Enhancing Scalability and Load Balancing through Sharding in Consortium Blockchain-Based Agri-Food Supply Chain System

Author(s): Xingjian Tian, Guangke Qi

Agri-food supply chain is undergoing a transformation towards increasing intelligence and automation with the integration of blockchain technology, particularly consortium blockchains, which are more suitable for realistic applications by offering member management, privacy protection, data auditability and traceability. Despite these advantages, scalability and system performance remain as the bottlenecks. To address this, sharding technology has been adopted but typical sharding protocols such as Relay and Broker are mostly designed for public blockchains and do not harness the potential of consortium blockchains. For that, we designed an agri-food supply chain system model and proposed a new sharding partition algorithm: Weighted and Constrained Label Propagation Algorithm (WCLPA), which brings in the factor of consortium's organization-based weighting accordingly and integrates with BrokerChain, a cutting-edge sharding protocol. Then we tested using a transaction driven simulator, and the evaluation results indicate that our scheme excels in a spectrum of metrics including TPS, confirmation latency, load balancing of transactions and inter-shard transaction ratio. This research signifies a future promising stride towards optimizing consortium blockchain performance in the agri-food supply chain domain through sharding.

Agri-Food Supply Chain, Consortium Blockchain, Sharding, Community-Aware Partition

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