AT-BSS: A Broker Selection Strategy for Efficient Cross-Shard Processing in Sharded IoT-Blockchain Systems.

Area of Science:

• Blockchain Technology
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Distributed Systems
• Network Security

Background:

• Blockchain and IoT integration offers trusted data sharing but faces scalability issues.
• Sharding improves scalability but introduces cross-shard transaction overhead.
• Existing broker-based solutions lack dynamic broker selection, impacting performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate the Accumulative Activity-Temporal Liveness Broker Selection Strategy (AT-BSS) for sharded IoT-blockchain systems.
• To optimize cross-shard transaction processing by addressing broker selection.
• To enhance system performance metrics like TPS and reduce latency.

Main Methods:

• Formal characterization of account 'Accumulative Activity' and 'Temporal Liveness'.
• Identification of accounts maximizing transaction-aggregation efficiency using these metrics.
• Implementation of AT-BSS on the BlockEmulator platform for evaluation.
• Comparative analysis against ABChain and BrokerChain baselines.

Main Results:

• AT-BSS consistently outperforms ABChain and BrokerChain across various system parameters.
• Achieved up to 15.5% higher Transactions Per Second (TPS) than ABChain.
• Reduced Transaction Confirmation Latency (TCL) by up to 80.2% and Cross-shard Transaction Ratio (CTX) by up to 28.7% compared to ABChain.
• Demonstrated significant improvements over BrokerChain: up to 229% higher TPS, reduced TCL by 97.7%, and CTX by 80.5%.

Conclusions:

• AT-BSS effectively optimizes cross-shard transaction processing in sharded IoT-blockchains.
• The proposed strategy significantly improves system throughput and reduces transaction latency.
• Dynamic broker selection based on account activity and liveness is crucial for efficient sharded blockchain systems.