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GeoChain: A Locality-Based Sharding Protocol for Permissioned Blockchains

Published: 04 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that uses cryptography and consensus protocols to record a growing list of transactions in a tamper-resistant manner. Scalability is one of the main problems that limit its usage. This paper introduces a full sharding protocol, Geochain, for permissioned blockchains. We first clarify the limitations of state-of-the-art sharding protocols. Then, we propose a locality-based sharding protocol that achieves high scalability. We optimize inter-shard performance by clustering participants using their geographical properties, locality. In addition, the locality is also employed to decide the transaction placement which results in a low ratio of cross-shard transactions for applications, such as everyday banking, retail payments, and electric vehicle charging. We also propose a client-driven efficient mechanism to handle cross-shard transactions and present an analysis. This enables clients to manage their assets across different shards directly. A prototype is implemented on top of Hyperledger Fabric v2.3 and evaluated on Amazon EC2. The experiments show that our protocol doubles the peak throughput, even with a high ratio of cross-shard transactions, while minimizing the transaction latency.

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  • (2024)Mapping the landscape and roadmap of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) in quantitative human geography: An extensive systematic reviewInternational Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation10.1016/j.jag.2024.103734128(103734)Online publication date: Apr-2024

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICDCN '23: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
    January 2023
    461 pages
    ISBN:9781450397964
    DOI:10.1145/3571306
    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: 04 January 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Locality
    2. Permissioned Blockchain
    3. Scalability
    4. Sharding
    5. Transactions

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    • (2024)Mapping the landscape and roadmap of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) in quantitative human geography: An extensive systematic reviewInternational Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation10.1016/j.jag.2024.103734128(103734)Online publication date: Apr-2024

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