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Dispatcher: Resource-aware Nakamoto Blockchain via Hierarchical Topology and Adaptive Incentives

Published: 18 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Mainstream blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are revolutionizing the financial industry by adopting the Nakamoto consensus protocol, i.e., Proof-of-Work (PoW). Only nodes with sufficient computing resources can work out the PoW difficulties, thereby increasing the mining cost of malicious attackers and ensuring the security of blockchain systems. Such an assumption of having abundant resources leads to drawbacks of low throughput and risk of centralization. In this article, we present Dispatcher, a novel distributed consensus protocol that takes resource heterogeneity into account to ensure resource-aware PoW with high efficiency. Dispatcher introduces a hierarchical topology to offer flexible PoW difficulties tailored for different nodes’ resources. In particular, it utilizes the limited resource of each node to jointly maximize the performance by concurrent mining. Moreover, we design an adaptive incentive mechanism to fit the available resource of blockchain nodes to rewards. Our experiments show that Dispatcher enjoys a substantial performance margin over the state-of-the-art. We can achieve a 50% throughput improvement compared with OHIE.

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  1. Dispatcher: Resource-aware Nakamoto Blockchain via Hierarchical Topology and Adaptive Incentives

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    Published In

    cover image Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice
    Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice  Volume 3, Issue 2
    June 2024
    163 pages
    EISSN:2769-6480
    DOI:10.1145/3613670
    Issue’s Table of Contents

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 June 2024
    Online AM: 23 December 2023
    Accepted: 30 April 2023
    Revised: 11 April 2023
    Received: 14 December 2022
    Published in DLT Volume 3, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Blockchain
    2. resource heterogeneity
    3. incentive
    4. hierarchical architecture

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    • National Key Research and Development Program of China
    • Key Research and Development Program of Hubei Province
    • National Natural Science Foundation of China
    • Knowledge Innovation Program of Wuhan-Shuguang

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