Article
Open Access
Frustum: achieving high throughput in blockchain systems through hierarchical and pipelined sharding
1 School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
2 Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macao, China
  • Volume
  • Citation
    Xu Y, Wu W, Gong Y, Ye Wang K, Hu C, et al. Frustum: achieving high throughput in blockchain systems through hierarchical and pipelined sharding. Blockchain 2024(1):0002, https://doi.org/10.55092/blockchain20240002. 
  • DOI
    10.55092/blockchain20240002
  • Copyright
    Copyright2024 by the authors. Published by ELSP.
Abstract

Sharding, breaking nodes into smaller groups, aims to enhance the scalability of traditional blockchain systems by allowing parallel transaction processing. However, existing sharding methods face challenges, including heavy inter-shard communication, re-sharding overhead, and low consensus concurrency. These limitations ultimately result in less desired system performance. To address these challenges, we propose Frustum, a novel hierarchical and pipelined sharding blockchain system. It separates shards into two layers: top L-Shard and base F-Shards. In each round, a global leader is elected from L-Shard and broadcasts a new block to F-Shard nodes, negating the need for final committee confirmation and simplifying the consensus process. Additionally, Frustum adopts a random re-sharding mechanism to mitigate the re-sharding overhead issue. Finally, Frustum employs a pipelined structure for enhanced consensus concurrency. Our Frustum prototype demonstrates a substantial performance boost, improving transaction throughput by 2.79 and 1.68 times over existing sharding systems with 16 shards and 1024 nodes.

Keywords

blockchain sharding; complete pipeline; Frustum

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