GT-NRSM: efficient and scalable sharding consensus mechanism for consortium blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain is an innovative application of distributed storage, consensus mechanism, cryptographic algorithm and other computer technologies. As the underlying architecture of blockchain, consensus mechanism is the key to realize service-oriented applications of blockchain in terms of its security, efficiency and scalability optimization. In some high complexity consensus mechanism such as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), throughput is severely reduced as the number of nodes increases, and even in low complexity algorithms such as Raft, the load on leader is severely affected as the network size increases, which affecting consensus efficiency. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a node reliable shard model based on guarantee tree (GT-NRSM) that achieves high scalability while ensuring a certain degree of decentralization and security based on consortium blockchain. Firstly, we design a guarantee mechanism to represent the trust relationship between nodes, and then we design a reliable node selection strategy based on the guarantee mechanism to evaluate the node guarantee results and consensus behavior, determine the node trust status, and identify Article Title malicious nodes and select a list of trusted leaders. Secondly, we propose a Dual-Leaders supervision mechanism, where deputy detects the heartbeat of leader while the deputy activity is detected by consensus nodes. Finally, we use guarantee mechanism and reliable node selection strategy to design a network partitioning method to achieve high concurrent consensus for multiple partitions and greatly improve the consensus efficiency. Subsequent experiments show that the throughput of the proposed algorithm improves by 48% over Raft and is much higher than PBFT, which has higher throughput and lower consensus latency.