(INFOCOM2021)Layered Sharding Architecture for Blockchain

Introduction

As a promising solution to blockchain scalability, sharding divides blockchain nodes into small groups called shards, splitting the workload. Existing works for sharding, however, are limited by cross-shard transactions, since they need to split each cross-shard transaction into multiple sub-transactions, each of which costs a consensus round to commit. To deal with the serious performance degradation brought by cross-shard transactions. Therefore, we propose a novel layered sharding architecture for blockchain and a cooperation-based layered sharding consensus. The basic idea is to allow shards to overlap, rather than isolating them completely, so that some nodes can locate in more than one shard. For cross-shard transactions, nodes located in the overlap of these shards can cooperative to verify, process and commit them directly and efficiently.

Reference

Pyramid: A Layered Sharding Blockchain System, INFOCOM 2021 (CCF-A).