Maximizing Blockchain Performance: Mitigating Conflicting Transactions through Parallelism and Dependency Management
Faisal Haque Bappy, Tarannum Shaila Zaman, Md Sajidul Islam Sajid, Mir Mehedi Ahsan Pritom, Tariqul Islam
TL;DR
Contention weakens blockchain performance by causing conflicting transactions to fail or stall processing. The paper introduces ConChain, a dependency-manager and parallel-ordering framework that enhances transaction parallelism without modifying existing orderers or consensus, demonstrated within Hyperledger Fabric. Key contributions include formalizing contention paradigms, a custom contention dataset, and a hardware-backed evaluation showing higher success rates, reduced latency, and increased throughput versus FastFabric and baseline Fabric. The work offers a pluggable approach with practical implications for scalable, secure blockchain deployments.
Abstract
While blockchains initially gained popularity in the realm of cryptocurrencies, their widespread adoption is expanding beyond conventional applications, driven by the imperative need for enhanced data security. Despite providing a secure network, blockchains come with certain tradeoffs, including high latency, lower throughput, and an increased number of transaction failures. A pivotal issue contributing to these challenges is the improper management of "conflicting transactions", commonly referred to as "contention". When a number of pending transactions within a blockchain collide with each other, this results in a state of contention. This situation worsens network latency, leads to the wastage of system resources, and ultimately contributes to reduced throughput and higher transaction failures. In response to this issue, in this work, we present a novel blockchain scheme that integrates transaction parallelism and an intelligent dependency manager aiming to reduce the occurrence of conflicting transactions within blockchain networks. In terms of effectiveness and efficiency, experimental results show that our scheme not only mitigates the challenges posed by conflicting transactions, but also outperforms both existing parallel and non-parallel Hyperledger Fabric blockchain networks achieving higher transaction success rate, throughput, and latency. The integration of our scheme with Hyperledger Fabric appears to be a promising solution for improving the overall performance and stability of blockchain networks in real-world applications.