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System architecture for high-performance permissioned blockchains

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Abstract

Blockchain(BC), as an emerging distributed database technology with advanced security and reliability, has attracted much attention from experts who devoted to e-finance, intellectual property protection, the Internet of Things (IoT) and so forth. However, the inefficient transaction processing speed, which hinders the BC’s widespread, has not been well tackled yet. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, called Dual-Channel Parallel Broadcast model (DCPB), which could address such a problem to a greater extent by using three methods which are dual communication channels, parallel pipeline processing and block broadcast strategy. In the dual-channel model, one channel processes transactions, and the other engages in the execution of BFT. The parallel pipeline processing allows the system to operate asynchronously. The block generation strategy improves the efficiency and speed of processing. Extensive experiments have been applied to BeihangChain, a simplified prototype for BC system, illustrates that its transaction processing speed could be improved to 16K transaction per second which could well support many real-world scenarios such as BC-based energy trading system and Micro-film copyright trading system in CCTV.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFB1400200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61672075, M1450009 and 61462003).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Libo Feng, Hui Zhang, Wei-Tek Tsai & Simeng Sun

  2. Digital Society & Blockchain Laboratory, School of Computer Science, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Libo Feng, Hui Zhang & Wei-Tek Tsai

  3. Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Hui Zhang

  4. School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

    Wei-Tek Tsai

Authors
  1. Libo Feng
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  2. Hui Zhang
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  3. Wei-Tek Tsai
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  4. Simeng Sun
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hui Zhang.

Additional information

Libo Feng received his MS degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, China in 2008. He is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Computer Science, Beihang University, China since 2015, China. His research interests include big data analysis and processing, distributed systems, machine learning, and blockchain.

Hui Zhang is currently a professor at the School of Computer Science, Beihang University, China. He received his PhD degree from Beihang University in 2010. He was a visiting scholar in the Argonne National Laboratory, USA in 2007–2008. His current research interests include big data analysis and processing, distributed systems, machine learning, and blockchain.

Wei-Tek Tsai is currently a professor in the School of Computing Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University, USA. He received his PhD and MS in computer science from University of California at Berkeley, and SB in computer science and engineering from MIT, USA. He focused his energy on service-oriented computing and SaaS, and worked on various aspects of software engineering including blockchain, architecture, testing, and maintenance.

Simeng Sun is currently an undergraduate in the Department of Computer Science, Beihang University, China since 2013. She is conducting her graduation project at State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment. Her research interests include distributed systems, machine learning, smart contracts, and blockchain.

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Feng, L., Zhang, H., Tsai, WT. et al. System architecture for high-performance permissioned blockchains. Front. Comput. Sci. 13, 1151–1165 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-6345-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-6345-4

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