Parallel Transaction Processing Research Articles

A Scalable, Secure, and Efficient Framework for Sharing Electronic Health Records Using Permissioned Blockchain Technology

This paper presents a scalable, secure blockchain-based healthcare system architecture that efficiently manages large patient datasets. DHTs and Skip Lists enable efficient data access, while DPoS and PBFT facilitate parallel transaction processing. Adaptive filters, Radix Trees extended by Merkle Trees, and an immutable blockchain ledger secured by Tendermint consensus ensure data integrity and protection against evolving threats. Threshold Cryptography secures consensus participant selection, and Bulletproofs verify transactions, complying with healthcare regulations. ChaCha20, a symmetric stream cipher, encrypts sensitive data, enhancing performance across devices. ABAC manages access rights, ensuring fine-grained control over data accessibility. This architecture offers a comprehensive, efficient, and secure solution for healthcare data management in blockchain environments.

An Elixir for Blockchain Scalability with Channel based Clustered Sharding

Blockchain refers to distributed ledger technology which stores records without the help of a central authority. Born with bitcoin, this brainstorming technology finds its applications in healthcare, land registry, education, pharmaceutical industry, digital records, manufacturing companies and so on. The properties of blockchain such as immutability, distributed nature, tamper-resistant made it a disruptive technology in many applications. The highlighting feature of this pioneering technology is the distributed storage of ledger on all the nodes of the network. This helps to achieve decentralization without the trust for third party. The transactions are proposed, executed, validated and are then added as blocks to the blockchain. The problems with all the blockchain framework is scalability with respect to storage space and throughput. Scalability is the most significant factor to be considered in this big data era. This article proposes a solution called Channel Based Clustered Sharding (CBCS) approach for Hyperledger fabric blockchain framework. In this work, a lookup table is maintained which helps in forwarding the transactions to the clustered shards for validation. The CBCS approach helps in parallel transaction processing which in turn improves scalability and throughput of the system. The performance of the proposed work is measured with the help of Hyperledger caliper, a benchmarking tool for the performance analysis of Hyperledger fabric. The results show that the performance of the proposed system is increased from 3000 tps to 30,000 tps.

A Scalable Sharding Protocol Based on Cross-Shard Dynamic Transaction Confirmation for Alliance Chain in Intelligent Systems

Applying sharding protocol to address scalability challenges in alliance chain is popular. However, inevitable cross-shard transactions significantly hamper performance even at low ratios, negating scalability benefits when they dominate as shard scale grows. This article proposes a new sharding protocol suitable for alliance chain that reduces cross-shard transaction impact, improving system performance. It adopts a directed acyclic graph ledger, enabling parallel transaction processing, and employs dynamic transaction confirmation consensus for simplicity. The protocol's sharding process and node score mechanism can deter malicious behavior. Experiments show that compared with mainstream sharding protocols, the protocol performs better when affected by cross-shard transactions. Moreover, its throughput has shown improvement compared to high-performance protocols without cross-shard transactions. This solution suits systems requiring high throughput and reliability, maintaining a stable performance advantage even as cross-shard transactions increase to the usual maximum ratio.

Mitigating Conflicting Transactions in Hyperledger Fabric-Permissioned Blockchain for Delay-Sensitive IoT Applications

Blockchain is a promising emerging technology that is envisioned to play a key role in establishing secure and reliable Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystems without the involvement of any third party. Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain system that can yield high throughput and low consensus delay, has shown its capability in enhancing security and privacy protection for delay-sensitive IoT services. The literature, however, has not considered the conflicting transaction problem which may substantially limit the system performance and degrade QoS for the end users. In this article, we propose CATP-Fabric, a new blockchain system to address the conflicting transaction problem by reducing the number of potentially conflicting transactions with less overhead. First, the transactions within a block are divided into different groups to facilitate parallel transaction processing. Then, CATP-Fabric filters stale transactions and prioritizes the read-only transactions in each group to eliminate unnecessary overhead. Finally, we formulate the selection of aborting transactions in CATP-Fabric as a binary integer-programming problem and develop a low-complexity optimization algorithm to minimize the number of aborted transactions. Illustrative results show that our proposed CATP-Fabric blockchain system achieves high throughput of successful transactions while maintaining a lower aborting transaction rate compared to the benchmark blockchain systems.

The M/G/oo Queueing Model for Optimistic Concurrency Control

The M/G/∞ queue with Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) is a model for a special form of parallel transaction processing in a real-time database. Transactions arrive according to a Poisson process and require some generally distributed execution time. One of the differences with ordinary multi- and infinite-server queueing models is that under OCC the successful completion of one transaction may immediately cause the failure of one or more of the other transactions. This happens if the completing transaction has overwritten a data-item that is in use by another transaction in progress. As soon as this failure is detected the failed transaction is restarted. So the total service time of a transaction consists of its final successful run and the time spent on unsuccessful runs. In this study we develop an approximation for the distribution of the total service time, and test the approximation against simulation. Although in practice the number of servers is never unlimited, this study provides valuable insight in the asymptotics with respect to the number of servers. The approximation clearly demonstrates the very limited performance gain from an increase of the number of servers.

Simulation studies on concurrency control in parallel transaction processing systems

Parallel transaction processing (TP) systems have great potential to serve the ever-increasing demands for high transaction processing rate. This potential, however, may not be reached due to the concurrency control (CC) requirements. In this paper a simulation system for shared-nothing parallel TP systems was presented, which aims at, but is not restricted to, the studies of the CC methods. A distributed locking-based CC method called LW DC k (local wait-depth control) was also proposed for overcoming the drawbacks of the widely-used two-phase locking (2PL) CC method. LW DC k was compared with 2PL and the well-known DWDL (distributed wait-depth limited) CC methods based on the presented simulation system. The application of this simulation system demonstrated its effectiveness. Simulation studies indicated also that the proposed method outperforms 2PL and DWDL.

Integrated commitment protocol for parallel transaction processing in real-time systems

To ensure the correctness of a parallel transaction processing system, we should guarantee the transaction atomicity despite of failures such as transaction abort or processor crash. When a real-time system employs parallel processing, it must achieve failure atomicity with timeliness because its major goal is to meet various timing requirements. A variety of protocols for ensuring correctness in real-time processing have been proposed. However, these protocols did not consider both timeliness and correctness together for the parallel processing. They considered only one of two; timeliness or correctness. Because real-time transactions must guarantee the timeliness and the correct completion in the presence of failures, the parallel transaction processing in real-time systems must consider both timeliness and correctness. This paper proposes a new commit protocol, which is called Integrated Commitment Protocol (ICP). This protocol is composed of two parts: the one is language constructs to reflect real-time requirements and the other is the commit procedures to guarantee the failure atomicity.