Reducing the Bandwidth of Block Propagation in Bitcoin Network With Erasure Coding

Ming Jin,Xiaojiao Chen,Sian-Jheng Lin

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2957496

Ming Jin, Xiaojiao Chen + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2957496

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Journal: IEEE Access	Publication Date: Jan 1, 2019
Citations: 15	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Science and Technology of China

Abstract

With the popularity of Bitcoin, there is a greater demand for the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain, which is susceptible to the efficiency of block propagation. In the Bitcoin blockchain, efficient block propagation approach can reduce the computing power and the risk of forks. Meanwhile, larger blocks help to improve the throughput of transactions. Thus, the block propagation is a major issue of the scalability of the Bitcoin network. This paper introduces a method to reduce the required bandwidth of block propagation with erasure coding. To begin with, the network nodes are classified into several clusters. When a node wants to propagate a block, the node does not need to propagate the whole information of the block. Instead, the node can only transmit the transaction IDs and the coded information to each cluster. The simulation shows that the proposed method can significantly ease the network traffic among these clusters.

Highlights

In recent years, blockchain has shown its wide range of applications, such as the digital currency and the smart contract
The block propagation is vital for ensuring the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain
The propagation mechanisms rely on the synchronized memory pools among participating nodes

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Blockchain has shown its wide range of applications, such as the digital currency and the smart contract. Are proposed to reduce the required bandwidth of propagating a block in the Bitcoin network [3]–[5]. These techniques heavily rely on the assumption that all transactions in L are in the memory pool of each node. We focus on the bandwidth of the block propagation when the receiver misses a few transactions in L. We propose an erasure-coding based protocol to reduce the bandwidth of transmitting missing transactions. M. Jin et al.: Reducing the Bandwidth of Block Propagation in Bitcoin Network With Erasure Coding. The node A first sends transaction IDs to receiver nodes.

BACKGROUND

SIMULATION

Findings

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION