TREE-BASED STATE SHARDING FOR SCALABILITY AND LOAD BALANCING IN MULTICHAIN SYSTEMS

Abstract

Staying abreast with the fast-paced demand surge towards distributed consensus systems has become one of the global trends in the fields of science and engineering. The blockchain technology, its consensus protocols, communication methods, and architectural approaches are prevalent in trustless transactional systems. In that context, one of the key obstacles faced by engineers and interaction peers is the limited scalability capacity entailed with these systems due to consistency and reliability requirements. Modern blockchain systems introduce complexities related to the storage space management, transaction execution latencies, and, in general, the throughput of operations, which stifles the widespread integration of decentralized systems in day-to-day activities. In order to circumvent these limitations, a plethora of inter-chain communication protocols, sharding strategies, and capacity extension methods are being actively developed by both scientific and engineering communities to mitigate initial logical limitations of the proposed consensus technology. Nonetheless, the developed solutions are associated with limitations of their own, often converging to a bottlenecked point in their load balancing approach or sacrificing significantly in finality and latency properties. The purpose of this article is to introduce and describe the tree-based sharding approach of multichain systems. Firstly, this paper describes a general architecture of the proposed network, establishing a foundation upon which the later discussion takes place. Secondly, a set of communication methods involving parents, siblings, and remote branches to exchange transaction data. Lastly, the proposed sharding architecture and its properties are compared with a set of existing strategies towards achieving scalability within the confines of the blockchain technology. Overall, this article presents a novel approach towards building reliable, scalable, and highly efficient multichain systems through a structured tree-like hierarchy of cooperating blockchain networks.