X
WeiBo
WeChat
Facebook
LinkedIn
Reddit
BlueskyBMDS-Shard: a parallel and atomicity-guaranteed cross-shard blockchain protocol
- Volume
- CitationChen H, Zheng J, Luo X, Liu Z, Shen , et al. BMDS-Shard: a parallel and atomicity-guaranteed cross-shard blockchain protocol. Blockchain 2025(2):0010, https://doi.org/10.55092/blockchain20250010.
- DOI10.55092/blockchain20250010
- CopyrightCopyright2025 by the authors. Published by ELSP.
Sharding is a key technology to improve the scalability of blockchain, and cross-shard transaction protocols are the core of sharding to ensure transaction atomicity and consistency. Many scholars have conducted related research, including two-phase commit (2PC), transaction splitting, relay transactions, and deterministic ordering. However, there remains a challenge in balancing the efficiency and atomicity of cross-shard transactions (CTXs). Thus, this paper proposes a parallel and atomicity-guaranteed cross-shard transaction protocol, BMDS-Shard. Firstly, by decoupling cross-shard transactions into synchronized transactions in the source and target shards through beacon nodes, and automatically identifying cross-shard processing flows, we assign higher processing priority within shards, thereby solving the inefficiency of relay transactions. Secondly, based on a multi-beacon node data snapshot mechanism, we ensure instant and reliable state data feedback to the source shard, addressing the insufficient atomicity of transaction splitting. Finally, we have implemented the BMDS-Shard protocol, conducted theoretical analysis, and performed experimental validation on the BlockEmulator platform. Both theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that while guaranteeing transaction atomicity, our protocol reduces cross-shard transaction confirmation latency by 65.82% and 65.06% compared to existing relay transaction protocols Monoxide and BrokerChain, respectively.
blockchain; sharding; cross-shard transaction; snapshot synchronization; priority scheduling; medical data sharing
- Zhang R, Xue R, Liu L. Security and privacy for healthcare blockchains.
IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 2021, 15(6):3668–3686. - Huang H, Yue Z, Peng X, He L, Chen W,
et al. Elastic resource allocation against imbalanced transaction assignments in sharding-based pennissioned blockchains.IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 2022, 33(10):2372–2385. - Xie J, Yu FR. Huang T, Xie R, Liu J,
et al . A survey on the scalability of blockchain systems.IEEE Network 2019, 33(5): 166–17 - Cai X, Geng S, Zhang J,
et al . A sharding scheme-based many-objective optimization algorithm for enhancing security in blockchain-enabled industrial internet of things.IEEE Trans. Ind. Inf. 2021, 17(11):7650–7658. - Shi J, Zhang A, Bai XY, Cai HQ, Liu XZ. Survey on performance optimization technologies of distributed ledger system (In Chinese).
J. Softw. 2023, 34(10): 4607–463 - Que Q, Chen Z, Zhang Z,
J. Comput. Res. Dev. 2023, 60(11):2469–2488. - Xu J, Ming Y, Wu Z, Wang C, Jia X
. X-shard: optimistic cross-shard transaction processing for sharding-based blockchains.IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 35(4):548–559. - Hong Z, Guo S, Zhou E, Zhang J, Chen W,
et al . Prophet: conflict-free sharding blockchain via byzantine-tolerant deterministic ordering. InIEEE INFOCOM 2023 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications , New York City, USA, May 17–20, 2023, pp. 1–10. - Zamani M, Movahedi M, Raykova M. RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding. In
Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security , Torond, Canada, October 15–19, 2018, pp. 931–948. - Liu A, Liu Y, Wu Q, Zhao B, Li D,
et al. CHERUBIM: A secure and highly parallel cross-shard consensus using quadruple pipelined two-phase commit for sharding blockchains.IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 2024, 19:3178–3193. - Wang JP, Wang H. Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with asynchronous consensus zones. In
16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. Boston: USENIX Associatio n, Boston, USA, February 26–28, 2019, pp. 95–112. - Huang H, Ye G, Yang Q, Chen Q, Yin Z,
et al . BlockEmulator: an emulator enabling to test blockchain sharding protocols. IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 2025, 18(2):690–703. - Kokoris-Kogias E, Jovanovic P, Gasser L, Gailly N, Ford B,
et al . Omniledger: a secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding. InProceedings of the 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) , - Al-Bassam M, Sonnino A, Bano S, Hrycyszyn D, Danezis G. Chainspace: a sharded smart contracts platform.
arXiv 2017, arXiv:1708.03778. - Hong Z, Guo S, Li P, Chen W. Pyramid: a layered sharding blockchain system. In
IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications , May 10–13, 2021, pp. 1–10. - Maymounkov P, Mazières D. Kademlia: a peer-to-peer information system based on the XOR Metric. In
Peer-to-Peer Systems , Cambridge, USA, 2002, pp. 53–65. - Shard chains. Danksharding. Available: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/shard-chains/ (accessed on 16 November 2024).
- Eykholt E, Meredith LG, Denman J. RChain architecture documentation. Available: https://architecture-docs-zh-cn.readthedocs.io/_/downloads/zh-cn/stable/pdf/ (accessed on 16 November 2024).
- Huang H, Peng X, Zhan J, Zhang S, Lin Y,
et al . BrokerChain: a cross-shard blockchain protocol for account/balance-based state sharding. InIEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications , May 2–5, 2022, pp. 1968–1977. - Qi X. S-Store: a scalable data store towards permissioned blockchain sharding. In
IEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications , London, UK, May 2–5, 2022, pp. 1978–1987. - Jiang N, Bai F, Huang L, An Z, Shen T.
Algorithms 2022, 15(2): 28−50.