An Elixir for Blockchain Scalability with Channel based Clustered Sharding

Abstract

Blockchain refers to distributed ledger technology which stores records without the help of a central authority. Born with bitcoin, this brainstorming technology finds its applications in healthcare, land registry, education, pharmaceutical industry, digital records, manufacturing companies and so on. The properties of blockchain such as immutability, distributed nature, tamper-resistant made it a disruptive technology in many applications. The highlighting feature of this pioneering technology is the distributed storage of ledger on all the nodes of the network. This helps to achieve decentralization without the trust for third party. The transactions are proposed, executed, validated and are then added as blocks to the blockchain. The problems with all the blockchain framework is scalability with respect to storage space and throughput. Scalability is the most significant factor to be considered in this big data era. This article proposes a solution called Channel Based Clustered Sharding (CBCS) approach for Hyperledger fabric blockchain framework. In this work, a lookup table is maintained which helps in forwarding the transactions to the clustered shards for validation. The CBCS approach helps in parallel transaction processing which in turn improves scalability and throughput of the system. The performance of the proposed work is measured with the help of Hyperledger caliper, a benchmarking tool for the performance analysis of Hyperledger fabric. The results show that the performance of the proposed system is increased from 3000 tps to 30,000 tps.