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User Distributions in Shard-based Blockchain Network: Queueing Modeling, Game Analysis, and Protocol Design

Published: 26 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Sharding is one of the most promising and practical methods to achieve horizontal scalability of blockchain networks. However, the increasing number of cross-shard transactions in blockchain sharding protocols may degrade the system throughput. In this paper, we investigate how to distribute users properly in the shard-based blockchains to boost the system transaction performance. We first build an open Jackson queueing network model to capture users' transaction dynamics on shards. Then we cast users' interactions as a shard-based blockchain game, wherein each user aims to minimize its transaction confirmation time and transaction fee. We investigate the equilibrium of the game, and design a polynomial-time algorithm to find efficient equilibria with good system performance. We further design a novel sharding protocol with dynamic user distribution for the permissionless blockchain, and the protocol can maintain good performance in long-term dynamic environment. Extensive numerical results using realistic blockchain transaction data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm and the designed protocol can achieve superior performance for shard-based blockchains.

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  • (2025)Blockchain for energy market: A comprehensive surveySustainable Energy, Grids and Networks10.1016/j.segan.2024.10161441(101614)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)X-Shard: Optimistic Cross-Shard Transaction Processing for Sharding-Based BlockchainsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2024.336118035:4(548-559)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Account Migration across Blockchain Shards using Fine-tuned Lock MechanismIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621244(271-280)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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        cover image ACM Conferences
        MobiHoc '21: Proceedings of the Twenty-second International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing
        July 2021
        286 pages
        ISBN:9781450385589
        DOI:10.1145/3466772
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 26 July 2021

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        Author Tags

        1. blockchain network
        2. game theory
        3. queueing
        4. sharding protocol

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        MobiHoc '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 139 submissions, 20%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 296 of 1,843 submissions, 16%

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        Cited By

        View all
        • (2025)Blockchain for energy market: A comprehensive surveySustainable Energy, Grids and Networks10.1016/j.segan.2024.10161441(101614)Online publication date: Mar-2025
        • (2024)X-Shard: Optimistic Cross-Shard Transaction Processing for Sharding-Based BlockchainsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2024.336118035:4(548-559)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
        • (2024)Account Migration across Blockchain Shards using Fine-tuned Lock MechanismIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621244(271-280)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
        • (2024)SharDAG: Scaling DAG-Based Blockchains Via Adaptive Sharding2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00165(2068-2081)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
        • (2024)TransShard: A Dynamic Transaction-Aware Sharding Scheme for Account-Based BlockchainIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.350595312(179797-179812)Online publication date: 2024
        • (2023)Incentive Mechanism for Throughput Enhancement in Blockchain-based Energy Trading System2023 IEEE International Conference on Metaverse Computing, Networking and Applications (MetaCom)10.1109/MetaCom57706.2023.00041(153-160)Online publication date: Jun-2023

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