A Scalable Sharding Protocol with Dynamic Cross-Shard Transaction Verification for High-Throughput Blockchains

International Journal of Computer Science and Technology | Vol. 2, No. 10, October 2021 | pp. 73–80

Research Article

Title: A Scalable Sharding Protocol with Dynamic Cross-Shard Transaction Verification for High-Throughput Blockchains

Names of Authors: Tan Nguyen¹, Hanh Tran², and Minh Le³

Authors’ Affiliations:
¹Faculty of Computer Science, University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
²Department of Information Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam
³School of Computer Engineering, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

Abstract: Blockchain systems encounter severe scalability barriers due to the constraint that every node must validate every network transaction. Sharding protocols resolve this bottleneck by splitting the network ledger into smaller, parallel processing units called shards. However, current sharding architectures generate heavy communication overhead and elevated transaction latency when executing cross-shard transactions, which compromises overall network throughput. This paper introduces an optimized, secure sharding protocol that utilizes a dynamic cross-shard validation pipeline driven by a two-phase Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism. The proposed framework implements a lock-free state atomic swap engine, allowing separate shards to verify mutual transaction dependencies simultaneously without stalling local ledger validation. To defend against 51% takeover exploits within individual sub-shards, a verifiable random function (VRF) executes continuous, unpredictable node re-allocation across the network topology. Performance evaluations conducted over a simulated setup of 2000 nodes distributed across 16 shards show a sustained transaction processing capacity of 8500 transactions per second (tx/sec). This performance represents a 42.6% throughput improvement over existing static sharding solutions. Furthermore, cross-shard confirmation latency drops by 31.2%, proving the protocol's viability for high-capacity enterprise ledger networks.

Keywords: Blockchain scalability, Network sharding, Consensus protocols, Byzantine fault tolerance, Cross-shard transactions, Verifiable random function

Manuscript Timeline: Received: July 11, 2021; Revised: August 19, 2021; Accepted: September 15, 2021; Published: October 1, 2021

Citation: Nguyen, T., Tran, H., & Le, M. (2021). A scalable sharding protocol with dynamic cross-shard transaction verification for high-throughput blockchains. International Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2(10), 73–80. DOI: 10.46882/2021/IJCST/000022

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