Blockchain Fragmentation Mechanism for Node Heterogeneity
Source abstract
Abstract
To enhance blockchain scalability, sharding technology enables parallel transaction processing, but existing solutions often neglect node heterogeneity, which introduces security risks and performance bottlenecks. This paper proposes a novel dynamic sharding scheme that dynamically allocates validators to shards based on their historical performance scores and computational power, ensuring balanced shard capacity and higher attack resistance. A tailored reward–penalty mechanism further incentivizes participation and discourages malicious behavior. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms prominent sharding protocols, including Elastico, OmniLedger, and RapidChain, by achieving higher throughput and lower latency. The proposed scheme effectively addresses node heterogeneity and enhances the overall scalability and security of blockchain systems.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline
Research context
OpenAlex topics: Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Distributed systems and fault tolerance · Cloud Computing and Resource Management
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
Cyberspace Institute of Advanced Technology, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, China
Department of New Networks, Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen 518000, China
School of Software Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China
Funding
National Key R&D Program of China · National Natural Science Foundation of China · Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province · Jointly Funded Projects of Universities, Institutes and Enterprises under the Basic Research Program of Guangzhou · Science and Technology Innovation Key R&D Program of Chongqing · Major Key Project of PCL · Project of Guangdong Key Laboratory of Industrial Control System Security
References (35)
Show source-provided references
1. Kogias, E.K., 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.
2. 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 ↗
3. Repchain: A reputation based secure fast and high incentive blockchain system via sharding10.1109/JIOT.2020.3028449 ↗
4. RepuCoin: Your reputation is your power10.1109/TC.2019.2900648 ↗
5. From mining to mitigation: How Bitcoin can support renewable energy development and climate action10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c05445 ↗
6. Forecasting Bitcoin prices using artificial intelligence: Combination of ML, SARIMA, and Facebook Prophet models10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122938 ↗
7. 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 ↗
8. Wang, G., Shi, Z.J., Nixon, M., and Han, S. (2019, January 21–23). Sok: Sharding on blockchain. Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, Zurich, Switzerland.10.1145/3318041.3355457 ↗
9. OverShard: Scaling blockchain by full sharding with overlapping network and virtual accounts10.1016/j.jnca.2023.103748 ↗
10. Sharding for scalable blockchain networks10.1007/s42979-022-01435-z ↗
11. A dynamic state sharding blockchain architecture for scalable and secure crowdsourcing systems10.1016/j.jnca.2023.103785 ↗
12. BrokerChain: A Blockchain Sharding Protocol by Exploiting Broker Accounts10.1109/TON.2025.3550502 ↗
13. Throughput-Scalable Shard Reorganization Tailored to Node Relations in Sharding Blockchain Networks10.1109/TCSS.2024.3406769 ↗
14. Wang, J., and Wang, H. (2019, January 26–28). Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with synchronous consensus zones. Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Boston, MA, USA.
15. Reputation-Based Coalition Formation for Secure Self-Organized and Scalable Sharding in IoT Blockchains With Mobile-Edge Computing10.1109/JIOT.2020.3002969 ↗
16. Alka, M., and Dwivedi, R.K. (2022). Enhancing Scalability in Sharding Blockchain via Interoperability Protocol. International Conference on Trends in Computational and Cognitive Engineering, Springer Nature.
17. Research on transaction allocation strategy in blockchain state sharding
18. 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 ↗
19. The application of blockchain-based crypto assets for integrating the physical and financial supply chains in the construction & engineering industry10.1016/j.autcon.2021.103711 ↗
20. Zheng, J., Huang, H., Li, C., Zheng, Z., and Guo, S. (2021, January 25–28). Revisiting double spending attacks on the bitcoin blockchain: New findings. Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS), Tokyo, Japan.10.1109/IWQOS52092.2021.9521306 ↗
21. Gueta, G.G., Abraham, I., Grossman, S., Malkhi, D., Pinkas, B., Reiter, M., Seredinschi, D.-A., Tamir, O., and Tomescu, A. (2019, January 24–27). SBFT: A scalable and decentralized frust infrastructure. Proceedings of the 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Portland, OR, USA.
22. MetaShard: A novel sharding blockchain platform for metaverse applications10.1109/TMC.2023.3290955 ↗
23. 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 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), Toronto, ON, Canada.
24. Saad, M., Cook, V., Nguyen, L., Thai, M.T., and Mohaisen, A. (2019, January 7–10). Partitioning attacks on bitcoin: Colliding space, time, and logic. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Dallas, TX, USA.10.1109/ICDCS.2019.00119 ↗
25. A survey on blockchain interoperability: Past, present, and future trends10.1145/3471140 ↗
26. Zheng, P., Xu, Q., Zheng, Z., Zhou, Z., Yan, Y., and Zhang, H. (2021, January 19–22). Meepo: Sharded consortium blockchain. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Chania, Greece.10.1109/ICDE51399.2021.00165 ↗
27. A flexible sharding blockchain protocol based on cross-shard byzantine fault tolerance10.1109/TIFS.2023.3266628 ↗
28. TP-PBFT: A scalable PBFT based on threshold proxy signature for IoT-blockchain applications10.1109/JIOT.2023.3347232 ↗
29. A survey of blockchain consensus protocols
30. A taxonomy of blockchain consensus protocols: A survey and classification framework10.1016/j.eswa.2020.114384 ↗
31. How much communication resource is needed to run a wireless blockchain network?10.1109/MNET.101.2100208 ↗
32. A survey on blockchain sharding10.1016/j.isatra.2023.06.029 ↗
33. Building blocks of sharding blockchain systems: Concepts, approaches, and open problems10.1016/j.cosrev.2022.100513 ↗
34. Service-aware dynamic sharding approach for scalable blockchain
35. Survey on blockchain networking: Context, state-of-the-art, challenges10.1145/3453161 ↗