NeuChain+: A Sharding Permissioned Blockchain System with Ordering-Free Consensus
Source abstract
Abstract
Permissioned blockchains are widely used in scenarios such as digital assets, supply chains, government services, and Web 3.0, but their development is hindered by low throughput and scalability. Blockchain sharding addresses these issues by dividing the ledger into disjoint shards that can be processed concurrently. However, since cross-shard transactions require the collaboration of multiple shards, blockchain sharding needs a commit protocol to ensure the atomicity of executing these transactions, significantly impacting system performance. To this end, by exploiting the characteristics of deterministic ordering, we propose a cross-shard transaction processing protocol called cross-reserve, which eliminates this costly cross-shard coordination while providing the same consistency and atomicity guarantee. Based on the ordering-free execute–validate (EV) architecture, we implemented a blockchain prototype called NeuChain+, which further reduces the cross-shard transaction processing overhead using the pipelined read sets transmission. Experimental results show that NeuChain+ is scalable and outperforms state-of-the-art blockchain systems with 1.7–75.3× throughput under the SmallBank workload.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline
Research context
OpenAlex topics: Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Distributed systems and fault tolerance · Optimization and Search Problems
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110169, China
Funding
National Social Science Foundation of China · National Natural Science Foundation of China · Special Funds for Basic Scientific Research of Central Universities
References (55)
Show source-provided references
1. Blockchain Meets Metaverse and Digital Asset Management: A Comprehensive Survey10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3257029 ↗
2. Blockchain technology’s impact on supply chain integration and sustainable supply chain performance: Evidence from the automotive industry10.1007/s10479-021-04129-6 ↗
3. A framework of blockchain-based secure and privacy-preserving E-government system10.1007/s11276-018-1883-0 ↗
4. Web3: A comprehensive review on background, technologies, applications, zero-trust architectures, challenges and future directions10.1016/j.iotcps.2023.05.003 ↗
5. Satija, S., Mehra, A., Singanamalla, S., Grover, K., Sivathanu, M., Chandran, N., Gupta, D., and Lokam, S. (2020, January 4–6). Blockene: A high-throughput blockchain over mobile devices. Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 20), Virtual.
6. OODIDA: On-board/off-board distributed real-time data analytics for connected vehicles10.1007/s41019-021-00152-6 ↗
7. Blockchain technology in supply chain management for sustainable performance: Evidence from the airport industry10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.09.010 ↗
8. How blockchain is changing finance
9. Androulaki, E., Barger, A., Bortnikov, V., Cachin, C., Christidis, K., De Caro, A., Enyeart, D., Ferris, C., Laventman, G., and Manevich, Y. (2018, January 23–26). Hyperledger fabric: A distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains. Proceedings of the Thirteenth EuroSys Conference, Porto, Portugal.10.1145/3190508.3190538 ↗
10. (2024, May 17). Visa Fact Sheet: What You Need to Know about One of the World’s Largest Payments Companies. Available online: https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf.
11. CAPER: A cross-application permissioned blockchain10.14778/3342263.3342275 ↗
12. Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery10.1145/571637.571640 ↗
13. Ongaro, D., and Ousterhout, J. (2014, January 19–20). In search of an understandable consensus algorithm. Proceedings of the 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 14), Philadelphia, PA, USA.
14. Eyal, I., Gencer, A.E., Sirer, E.G., and Van Renesse, R. (2016, January 16–18). {Bitcoin-NG}: A scalable blockchain protocol. Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16), Santa Clara, CA, USA.
15. Snow White: Provably secure proofs of stake
16. Kiayias, A., Russell, A., David, B., and Oliynykov, R. (2017, January 20–24). Ouroboros: A provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. Proceedings of the Annual International Cryptology Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.10.1007/978-3-319-63688-7_12 ↗
17. Miller, A., Xia, Y., Croman, K., Shi, E., and Song, D. (2016, January 24–28). The honey badger of BFT protocols. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Vienna, Austria.10.1145/2976749.2978399 ↗
18. Yin, M., Malkhi, D., Reiter, M.K., Gueta, G.G., and Abraham, I. (August, January 29). HotStuff: BFT consensus with linearity and responsiveness. Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Toronto, ON, Canada.10.1145/3293611.3331591 ↗
19. Gilad, Y., Hemo, R., Micali, S., Vlachos, G., and Zeldovich, N. (2017, January 28). Algorand: Scaling byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies. Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Shanghai, China.10.1145/3132747.3132757 ↗
20. Gupta, S., Rahnama, S., Hellings, J., and Sadoghi, M. (2020). Resilientdb: Global scale resilient blockchain fabric. arXiv.10.14778/3380750.3380757 ↗
21. Gupta, S., Hellings, J., and Sadoghi, M. (2021, January 19–22). Rcc: Resilient concurrent consensus for high-throughput secure transaction processing. Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE 37th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Chania, Greece.10.1109/ICDE51399.2021.00124 ↗
22. Stathakopoulou, C., Pavlovic, M., and Vukolić, M. (2022, January 5–8). State machine replication scalability made simple. Proceedings of the Seventeenth European Conference on Computer Systems, Rennes, France.10.1145/3492321.3519579 ↗
23. Qi, J., Chen, X., Jiang, Y., Jiang, J., Shen, T., Zhao, S., Wang, S., Zhang, G., Chen, L., and Au, M.H. (2021, January 26–29). Bidl: A high-throughput, low-latency permissioned blockchain framework for datacenter networks. Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Virtual.10.1145/3477132.3483574 ↗
24. Nathan, S., Govindarajan, C., Saraf, A., Sethi, M., and Jayachandran, P. (2019). Blockchain meets database: Design and implementation of a blockchain relational database. arXiv.10.14778/3342263.3342632 ↗
25. Neuchain: A fast permissioned blockchain system with deterministic ordering10.14778/3551793.3551816 ↗
26. Luu, L., Narayanan, V., Zheng, C., Baweja, K., Gilbert, S., and Saxena, P. (2016, January 24–28). A secure sharding protocol for open blockchains. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Vienna, Austria.10.1145/2976749.2978389 ↗
27. Kokoris-Kogias, E., Jovanovic, P., Gasser, L., Gailly, N., Syta, E., and Ford, B. (2018, January 20–24). Omniledger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), San Francisco, CA, USA.10.1109/SP.2018.000-5 ↗
28. Zamani, M., Movahedi, M., and Raykova, M. (2018, January 15–19). Rapidchain: Scaling blockchain via full sharding. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Toronto, ON, Canada.10.1145/3243734.3243853 ↗
29. Al-Bassam, M., Sonnino, A., Bano, S., Hrycyszyn, D., and Danezis, G. (2017). Chainspace: A sharded smart contracts platform. arXiv.10.14722/ndss.2018.23241 ↗
30. Byshard: Sharding in a byzantine environment10.14778/3476249.3476275 ↗
31. Dang, H., Dinh, T.T.A., Loghin, D., Chang, E.C., Lin, Q., and Ooi, B.C. (July, January 30). Towards scaling blockchain systems via sharding. Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Management of Data, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.10.1145/3299869.3319889 ↗
32. Transaction management in the R* distributed database management system10.1145/7239.7266 ↗
33. Özsu, M.T., and Valduriez, P. (1999). Principles of Distributed Database Systems, Springer.
34. Wang, J., and Wang, H. (2019, January 26–28). Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with asynchronous consensus zones. Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 19), Boston, MA, USA.
35. Nakamoto, S. (2021, October 20). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Available online: https://assets.pubpub.org/d8wct41f/31611263538139.pdf.
36. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger
37. Zheng, P., Xu, Q., Zheng, Z., Zhou, Z., Yan, Y., and Zhang, H. (2021, January 19–22). Meepo: Sharded consortium blockchain. Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE 37th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Chania, Greece.10.1109/ICDE51399.2021.00165 ↗
38. Huang, H., Peng, X., Zhan, J., Zhang, S., Lin, Y., Zheng, Z., and Guo, S. (2022, January 2–5). Brokerchain: A cross-shard blockchain protocol for account/balance-based state sharding. Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 2022—IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, London, UK.10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796859 ↗
39. Hong, Z., Guo, S., Zhou, E., Zhang, J., Chen, W., Liang, J., Zhang, J., and Zomaya, A. (2023, January 17–20). Prophet: Conflict-Free Sharding Blockchain via Byzantine-Tolerant Deterministic Ordering. Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 2023—IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, New York, NY, USA.10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228939 ↗
40. De Angelis, S., Aniello, L., Baldoni, R., Lombardi, F., Margheri, A., and Sassone, V. (2022, January 7). PBFT vs proof-of-authority: Applying the CAP theorem to permissioned blockchain. Proceedings of the CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS, Milan, Italy.
41. On optimistic methods for concurrency control10.1145/319566.319567 ↗
42. Dinh, T.T.A., Wang, J., Chen, G., Liu, R., Ooi, B.C., and Tan, K.L. (2017, January 14–19). Blockbench: A framework for analyzing private blockchains. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data, Chicago, IL, USA.10.1145/3035918.3064033 ↗
43. Serializable isolation for snapshot databases10.1145/1620585.1620587 ↗
44. Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony10.1145/42282.42283 ↗
45. Lu, Y., Yu, X., Cao, L., and Madden, S. (2020). Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).10.14778/3407790.3407808 ↗
46. (2022, June 30). NeuChain: A Fast Permissioned Blockchain System with Deterministic Ordering. Available online: https://github.com/iDC-NEU/NeuChain.
47. (2022, July 15). braft: An Industrial-Grade C++ Implementation of RAFT Consensus Algorithm. Available online: https://github.com/baidu/braft.
48. (2022, July 07). LevelDB: A Fast Key-Value Storage Library. Available online: https://github.com/google/leveldb.
49. (2022, July 04). ZeroMQ: A High-Performance Asynchronous Messaging Library. Available online: https://github.com/zeromq/cppzmq.
50. (2022, July 04). Protocol Buffers: The Language-Neutral, Platform-Neutral Extensible Mechanisms for Serializing Structured Data. Available online: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf.
51. Ruan, P., Loghin, D., Ta, Q.T., Zhang, M., Chen, G., and Ooi, B.C. (2020, January 14–19). A transactional perspective on execute-order-validate blockchains. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Portland, OR, USA.10.1145/3318464.3389693 ↗
52. FastFabric: Scaling hyperledger fabric to 20,000 transactions per second10.1002/nem.2099 ↗
53. Suri-Payer, F., Burke, M., Wang, Z., Zhang, Y., Alvisi, L., and Crooks, N. (2021, January 26–29). Basil: Breaking up BFT with ACID (transactions). Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Virtual.
54. (2024, April 15). Alibaba Cloud: Cloud Computing Services. Available online: https://www.alibabacloud.com/zh?_p_lc=1.
55. Cooper, B.F., Silberstein, A., Tam, E., Ramakrishnan, R., and Sears, R. (2010, January 10–11). Benchmarking cloud serving systems with YCSB. Proceedings of the 1st ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, Indianapolis, IN, USA.10.1145/1807128.1807152 ↗