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SEKad: a scalable protocol for blockchain networks with enhanced broadcast efficiency

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Abstract

Blockchain technology has been increasingly integrated into various fields of economic and social development. However, scalability issues such as low broadcast efficiency, high communication overhead, and high redundant transmission rate have greatly limited the large-scale application of blockchain. This paper proposes a new scalability-enhanced Kademlia network protocol (SEKad), which optimizes blockchain network transmission in terms of both network topology and communication broadcast mechanism, provides a new approach to solving the scalability problem from the network layer. In SEKad protocol, firstly, SEKad employs a method that aligns the physical topology with the network topology for node clustering. This strategy groups neighboring nodes into clusters, streamlining network complexity and reducing network diameter. Secondly, SEKad presents a cluster-adaptable network topology based on Kademlia (Kad-CA). Kad-CA improves the rationality and efficiency of per-hop routing, optimizing the construction of K buckets and thus enhancing overall network efficiency. Finally, within the network transmission model, SEKad devise the smallest sub-tree broadcasting mechanism and the minimum redundant transmission mechanism for Kad-CA. These mechanisms work to reduce the redundant transmission rate, and enhance broadcasting efficiency. In order to evaluate the performance of SEKad, we built an experimental platform and conducted evaluations. The experimental results show that SEKad has better network scalability and stability, the network diameter size can be reduced by 27% and the redundant transmission rate can be reduced by 30%.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the Major Scientific and Technological Projects in Yunnan Province under Grant 202002AB080001-8; in part by the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Blockchain Application Technology under Grant 202105AG070005 and Project YNB202109 and YNB202115; in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61971208; in part by the Yunnan Reserve Talents of Young and Middle-Aged Academic and Technical Leaders (Shen Tao) under Grant 2019HB005; in part by the Yunnan Young Top Talents of Ten thousand Plan (Shen Tao, Zhu Yan, Yunren Social Development) under Grant 2018 73; and in part by the Scientific Research Fund Project of Yunnan Provincial Department of Education under Grant 2022Y160.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650500, Yunnan, China

    Tao Shen, Qianqi Sun, Chi Zhang & Fenhua Bai

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  1. Tao Shen
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. TS and QS did the ideal development and most of the implementation and evaluation. The first draft of the manuscript was written by QS. CZ contributed to the technical discussion as well as contributed to the manuscript writing and proofreading. As the corresponding author, FB supervised the entire process from idea development to implementation, experimentation and evaluation, and paper writing.

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Correspondence to Fenhua Bai.

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Shen, T., Sun, Q., Zhang, C. et al. SEKad: a scalable protocol for blockchain networks with enhanced broadcast efficiency. Cluster Comput (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-023-04158-9

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