DIBN: A Decentralized Information-Centric Blockchain Network

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed ledger, characterized by immutability, anonymity and auditability without requiring trust third party. To provide data exchanges to form such ledger, blockchain network enables the dissemination of transactions and blocks to reach the consensus, which mainly consists of attachment strategy and communication strategy. Currently, it is implemented with peer-to-peer overlay network, which, however, suffers from the intrinsic problem of mismatching between traffic flows and underlying network topology. To solve this problem, we employ information-centric networking (ICN) approach to design a decentralized information-centric blockchain network (DIBN), where categories are named to enable the traffic to be decentralized and an any-to-all category dissemination structure (CDS) is established among all the blockchain nodes (BNs) for each category. For the CDS, one BN can efficiently send data to all other BNs aligning the traffic with the underlying network, which overcomes the problem of mismatch. The performance analysis shows that the proposed DIBN can greatly reduce the average path length for data dissemination in blockchain.