{"title":"Analytical Modeling and Throughput Computation of Blockchain Sharding","authors":"Pourya Soltani;Farid Ashtiani","doi":"10.1109/TPDS.2024.3376452","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Sharding has shown great potential to scale out blockchains. It divides nodes into smaller groups which allow for partial transaction processing, relaying and storage. Hence, instead of running one blockchain, we will run multiple blockchains in parallel, and call each one a shard. Sharding can be applied to address shortcomings due to compulsory duplication of three resources in blockchains, i.e., computation, communication and storage. The most pressing issue in blockchains today is throughput. In this paper, we propose new queueing-theoretic models to derive the maximum throughput of sharded blockchains. We consider two cases, a fully sharded blockchain and a computation sharding. We model each with a queueing network that exploits signals to account for block production as well as multi-destination cross-shard transactions. We make sure quasi-reversibility for every queue in our models is satisfied so that they fall into the category of product-form queueing networks. We then obtain a closed-form solution for the maximum stable throughput of these systems with respect to block size, block rate, number of destinations in transactions and the number of shards. Comparing the results obtained from the two introduced sharding systems, we conclude that the extent of sharding in different domains plays a significant role in scalability.","PeriodicalId":13257,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10468555/","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, THEORY & METHODS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Sharding has shown great potential to scale out blockchains. It divides nodes into smaller groups which allow for partial transaction processing, relaying and storage. Hence, instead of running one blockchain, we will run multiple blockchains in parallel, and call each one a shard. Sharding can be applied to address shortcomings due to compulsory duplication of three resources in blockchains, i.e., computation, communication and storage. The most pressing issue in blockchains today is throughput. In this paper, we propose new queueing-theoretic models to derive the maximum throughput of sharded blockchains. We consider two cases, a fully sharded blockchain and a computation sharding. We model each with a queueing network that exploits signals to account for block production as well as multi-destination cross-shard transactions. We make sure quasi-reversibility for every queue in our models is satisfied so that they fall into the category of product-form queueing networks. We then obtain a closed-form solution for the maximum stable throughput of these systems with respect to block size, block rate, number of destinations in transactions and the number of shards. Comparing the results obtained from the two introduced sharding systems, we conclude that the extent of sharding in different domains plays a significant role in scalability.
期刊介绍:
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) is published monthly. It publishes a range of papers, comments on previously published papers, and survey articles that deal with the parallel and distributed systems research areas of current importance to our readers. Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
a) Parallel and distributed algorithms, focusing on topics such as: models of computation; numerical, combinatorial, and data-intensive parallel algorithms, scalability of algorithms and data structures for parallel and distributed systems, communication and synchronization protocols, network algorithms, scheduling, and load balancing.
b) Applications of parallel and distributed computing, including computational and data-enabled science and engineering, big data applications, parallel crowd sourcing, large-scale social network analysis, management of big data, cloud and grid computing, scientific and biomedical applications, mobile computing, and cyber-physical systems.
c) Parallel and distributed architectures, including architectures for instruction-level and thread-level parallelism; design, analysis, implementation, fault resilience and performance measurements of multiple-processor systems; multicore processors, heterogeneous many-core systems; petascale and exascale systems designs; novel big data architectures; special purpose architectures, including graphics processors, signal processors, network processors, media accelerators, and other special purpose processors and accelerators; impact of technology on architecture; network and interconnect architectures; parallel I/O and storage systems; architecture of the memory hierarchy; power-efficient and green computing architectures; dependable architectures; and performance modeling and evaluation.
d) Parallel and distributed software, including parallel and multicore programming languages and compilers, runtime systems, operating systems, Internet computing and web services, resource management including green computing, middleware for grids, clouds, and data centers, libraries, performance modeling and evaluation, parallel programming paradigms, and programming environments and tools.