Abstract
Today, blockchains are popular due to their promise of maintaining a tamper-proof and reliable distributed ledger. As more and more organizations are trying to incorporate this technology within their applications, they are finding the performance and scalability of these systems to be significant bottlenecks. The emerging federated clouds, with a conglomeration of autonomous clouds, could be a solution for this problem. Integrating federated clouds within a blockchain can help overcome these bottlenecks without undermining the autonomy and the peer-to-peer characteristic of the underlying systems. In this paper, we identify a few of the roles in which a federated cloud can play an effective role in a blockchain. In particular, we focus on its role in reducing the communication cost, in cooperation with the miners, incurred in propagating the mined blocks to all the nodes in the system. The proposed integrated approach results in reduced communication cost and improved time for synchronization of the distributed ledger at different nodes. The reduction in network traffic and latency in block synchronization is achieved without deviating from the fundamental autonomous nature of blockchains. The proposed approach results in higher transaction throughputs and lower query response times.
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Sai Krishna, R.K.N., Tekur, C., Mukkamala, R., Baruah, P.K. (2020). Leveraging Federated Clouds for Improving Blockchain Performance. In: Zhang, Q., Wang, Y., Zhang, LJ. (eds) Cloud Computing – CLOUD 2020. CLOUD 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12403. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59635-4_2
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