Gas Consumption-Aware Dynamic Load Balancing in Ethereum Sharding Environments

Abstract

Advances in blockchain technology have made a significant impact on a wide range of research areas due to the features such as transparency, decentralization and traceability. With the explosive growth of blockchain transactions, there has been a growing interest in improving the scalability of blockchain network. Sharding is one of the methods to solve this scalability problem by partitioning the network into several shards so that each shard can process the transactions in parallel. Ethereum places each transaction statically on a shard based on its account address without considering the complexity of the transaction or the load generated by the transaction. This causes the transaction load on each shard to be uneven, which makes the transaction throughput of the network decrease. In this paper, we propose a dynamic load balancing mechanism among Ethereum shards called D-GAS. The D-GAS dynamically balances the transaction load of each shard by relocating the accounts based on the gas consumption to maximize the transaction throughput. Ethereum gas is a unit that represents the amount of computational effort needed to execute operations in a transaction. Benchmarking results show that the D-GAS outperforms existing techniques by up to 12% in transaction throughput and decreases the makespan of transaction latency by about 74% under various conditions.