A Dynamic Sharding Protocol Design for Consortium Blockchains

The transaction efficiency of blockchains has been a painful point haunting researchers all the time. The metrics of Transaction per Second (TPS) present a low value, especially as the number of network nodes increases. In order to improve the blockchain’s TPS, numerous articles explored the solutions from multiple aspects, such as: using a new block system based on the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), adjusting the block structure, optimizing the consensus algorithm or adopting a sharding protocol. The sharding protocols play an extremely important role among these schemes, while the existing ones suffer from secure risks due to their static sharding. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic sharding protocol for consortium blockchains, employing random values to randomly partition the network. Our protocol aims for improving the throughput of the blockchain system as well as ensuring its security. The OMNET++ simulation results showed that, in the case of a large-scale consortium blockchain network of 400 nodes which is divided into 16 shards, the performance of our scheme is able to attain up to 50 times promotion, compared to the system without sharding.