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.
blockchain sharding; complete pipeline; Frustum