Sharding-Hashgraph: A High-Performance Blockchain-Based Framework for Industrial Internet of Things With Hashgraph Mechanism

Abstract

In recent years, with the development and widespread use of blockchain, many projects have introduced blockchain technology to solve the increasingly serious security problems of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, due to the conflict between the operational performance and security of the blockchain system, the conflict between transparency and privacy, and the compatibility issues with a large number of IIoT devices running together, the mainstream blockchain system cannot be applied to IIoT scenarios. In order to solve these problems, in this article, we propose an IIoT distributed data system based on blockchain technology. We provide a novel system architecture for different IIoT devices to deploy high-performance blockchain systems in many scenarios, such as smart factory networks. To improve the performance of the blockchain network, we adopt the sharding hashgraph consensus mechanism and introduce a node evaluation mechanism based on the state of the node, which is applied to divide a large number of nodes into many shards dynamically. We abstract the node sharding problem as a joint optimization problem and use deep reinforcement learning to solve it. Finally, we compared with asynchronous Byzantine consensus algorithms, such as HoneybadgerBFT and BEAT, which validated the performance of this system architecture.