Storage Scalability Oriented Segment Allocation Based on Cost Clustering in Sharding Blockchains

Abstract

Blockchain technology has garnered significant attention from academia and industry, with scalability remaining a key challenge. Sharding is a promising solution, dividing the blockchain into smaller partitions called shards, each processing a portion of the transactions to increase throughput. This approach is critical for enabling efficient Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms, as demonstrated by the transition of Dogecoin to PoS, where sharding reduces the computational burden on validators and enhances scalability. However, sharding introduces high storage redundancy, as nodes in each shard must collectively maintain a copy of the entire blockchain, imposing substantial storage pressure. To address this, segments are introduced to divide the main chain into smaller parts distributed across nodes. Existing methods, however, randomly assign segments to nodes, resulting in high costs for node setup and segment queries. This paper investigates the optimal allocation of segments within shards to minimize these costs, proposing a Segment Allocation algorithm based on Cost Clustering (SACC). Theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate that SACC achieves lower setup, query, and total costs while maintaining security and scalability, offering a more efficient solution for sharding-based PoS blockchains like Dogecoin.