Optimal Endorsement for Network-Wide Distributed Blockchains
Iman Lotfimahyari, Paolo Giaccone · IEEE Systems Journal · 2023
Blockchains offer trust and immutability in nontrusted environments, but most are not fast enough for latency-sensitive applications. Hyperledger fabric (HF) is a common enterprise-level platform that is being offered as blockchain-as-a-service by cloud providers. In HF, every new transaction requires a preliminaryendorsementby multiple mutually untrusted parties called organizations, which contributes to the delay in storing the transaction in the blockchain. Theendorsement policyis specific to each application and defines the required approvals by theendorser peers(EPs) of the involved organizations. In this article, given an inputendorsement policy, we studied the optimal choice to distribute the endorsement requests to the proper EPs. We proposed the OPtimal ENdorsement (OPEN) algorithm, devised to minimize the latency due to both network delays and the processing times at the EPs. By extensive simulations, we showed that OPEN can reduce theendorsement latencyup to 70% compared to the state-of-the-art solution and approximated well the introduced optimal policies while offering a negligible implementation overhead compared to them.