Throughput-oriented associated transaction assignment in sharding blockchains for IoT social data storage

Abstract

Blockchain is a viable solution to provide data integrity for the enormous volume of 5G IoT social data, while we need to break through the throughput bottleneck of blockchain. Sharding is a promising technology to solve the problem of low throughput in blockchains. However, cross-shard communication hinders the effective improvement of blockchain throughput. Therefore, it is critical to reasonably allocate transactions to different shards to improve blockchain throughput. Existing research on blockchain sharding mainly focuses on shards formation, configuration, and consensus, while ignoring the negative impact of cross-shard communication on blockchain throughput. Aiming to maximize the throughput of transaction processing, we study how to allocate blockchain transactions to shards in this paper. We propose an Associated Transaction assignment algorithm based on Closest Fit (ATCF). ATCF classifies associated transactions into transaction groups which are then assigned to different shards in the non-ascending order of transaction group sizes periodically. Within each epoch, ATCF tries to select a shard that can handle all the transactions for each transaction group. If there are multiple such shards, ATCF selects the shard with the remaining processing capacity closest to the number of transactions in the transaction group. When no such shard exists, ATCF chooses the shard with the largest remaining processing capacity for the transaction group. The transaction groups that cannot be completely processed within the current epoch will be allocated in the subsequent epochs. We prove that ATCF is a 2-approximation algorithm for the associated transaction assignment problem. Simulation results show that ATCF can effectively improve the blockchain throughput and reduce the number of cross-shard transactions.