Building blocks of sharding blockchain systems: Concepts, approaches, and open problems
Research output: Contribution to journal › Review › Research › peer-review
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Building blocks of sharding blockchain systems : Concepts, approaches, and open problems. / Liu, Yizhong; Liu, Jianwei; Vaz Salles, Marcos Antonio; Zhang, Zongyang; Li, Tong; Hu, Bin; Henglein, Fritz; Lu, Rongxing.
In: Computer Science Review, Vol. 46, 100513, 11.2022.Research output: Contribution to journal › Review › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Building blocks of sharding blockchain systems
T2 - Concepts, approaches, and open problems
AU - Liu, Yizhong
AU - Liu, Jianwei
AU - Vaz Salles, Marcos Antonio
AU - Zhang, Zongyang
AU - Li, Tong
AU - Hu, Bin
AU - Henglein, Fritz
AU - Lu, Rongxing
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2022/11
Y1 - 2022/11
N2 - Sharding is the prevalent approach to breaking the trilemma of simultaneously achieving decentralization, security, and scalability in traditional blockchain systems, which are implemented as replicated state machines relying on atomic broadcast for consensus on an immutable chain of valid transactions. Sharding is to be understood broadly as techniques for dynamically partitioning nodes in a blockchain system into subsets (shards) that perform storage, communication, and computation tasks without fine-grained synchronization with each other. Despite much recent research on sharding blockchains, much remains to be explored in the design space of these systems. Towards that aim, we conduct a systematic analysis of existing sharding blockchain systems and derive a conceptual decomposition of their architecture into functional components and the underlying assumptions about system models and attackers they are built on. The functional components identified are node selection, epoch randomness, node assignment, intra-shard consensus, cross-shard transaction processing, shard reconfiguration, and motivation mechanism. We describe interfaces, functionality, and properties of each component and show how they compose into a sharding blockchain system. For each component, we systematically review existing approaches, identify potential and open problems, and propose future research directions. We focus on potential security attacks and performance problems, including system throughput and latency concerns such as confirmation delays. We believe our modular architectural decomposition and in-depth analysis of each component, based on a comprehensive literature study, provides a systematic basis for conceptualizing state-of-the-art sharding blockchain systems, proving or improving security and performance properties of components, and developing new sharding blockchain system designs.
AB - Sharding is the prevalent approach to breaking the trilemma of simultaneously achieving decentralization, security, and scalability in traditional blockchain systems, which are implemented as replicated state machines relying on atomic broadcast for consensus on an immutable chain of valid transactions. Sharding is to be understood broadly as techniques for dynamically partitioning nodes in a blockchain system into subsets (shards) that perform storage, communication, and computation tasks without fine-grained synchronization with each other. Despite much recent research on sharding blockchains, much remains to be explored in the design space of these systems. Towards that aim, we conduct a systematic analysis of existing sharding blockchain systems and derive a conceptual decomposition of their architecture into functional components and the underlying assumptions about system models and attackers they are built on. The functional components identified are node selection, epoch randomness, node assignment, intra-shard consensus, cross-shard transaction processing, shard reconfiguration, and motivation mechanism. We describe interfaces, functionality, and properties of each component and show how they compose into a sharding blockchain system. For each component, we systematically review existing approaches, identify potential and open problems, and propose future research directions. We focus on potential security attacks and performance problems, including system throughput and latency concerns such as confirmation delays. We believe our modular architectural decomposition and in-depth analysis of each component, based on a comprehensive literature study, provides a systematic basis for conceptualizing state-of-the-art sharding blockchain systems, proving or improving security and performance properties of components, and developing new sharding blockchain system designs.
KW - Byzantine Fault Tolerance
KW - Consensus
KW - Modular decomposition
KW - Scalability
KW - Sharding blockchain
KW - Throughput
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143067795&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cosrev.2022.100513
DO - 10.1016/j.cosrev.2022.100513
M3 - Review
AN - SCOPUS:85143067795
VL - 46
JO - Computer Science Review
JF - Computer Science Review
SN - 1574-0137
M1 - 100513
ER -
ID: 328889685