PShard: A Practical Sharding Protocol for Enterprise Blockchain
Jianbo Gao, Jiashuo Zhang, Yue Li, Jiakun Hao, Ke Wang, Zhi Guan, Zhong Chen · 2022
Enterprise blockchain is commonly a permissioned blockchain that processes complex and massive transactions among enterprises for cooperation. With the continuous increase of business scale, the performance of a single blockchain is difficult to meet the demand and sharding is considered as a potential technology that can solve the problem. However, existing sharding protocols either process transactions only on a subset of blockchain nodes or needs to modify consensus algorithm, making the protocols difficult to apply in enterprise blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose PShard, a practical sharding protocol for enterprise blockchain. PShard adopts a two-layer data model for sharded enterprise blockchain where each enterprise participates in every shard and uses a two-phase method to execute cross-shard transactions to guarantee the safety and liveness of the protocol. We implement a prototype of enterprise blockchain system based on PShard and evaluate it in the experiments. The experimental results show that the performance of the system grows linearly as the number of shards increases.