BELLTP: Bandwidth-Efficient and Low-Latency Transaction Propagation in Ethereum Network

Abstract

Ethereum is a leading blockchain system whose security and performance depend critically on efficient transaction propagation. Currently, to curb bandwidth, Ethereum employs a hybrid protocol wherein nodes eager-push full transactions to a random peer subset and announce hashes to the remainder for on-demand lazy-pull. Yet, our MainNet measurements reveal that this strategy suffers from “blind” forwarding—indiscriminately transmitting full transactions without evaluating receiver acceptance. This causes peers to receive multiple redundant copies of non-viable transactions that are ultimately discarded by local pools. Also, randomized peer selection results in substantial redundant transmission, excessive hops, and a high lazy-pull rate (the proportion of transactions acquired via the slower request-response mechanism). These two inefficiencies collectively prolong propagation latency and limit further bandwidth savings. To address these limitations, we propose BELLTP, aBandwidth-Efficient andLow-LatencyTransactionPropagation protocol that incorporates two key awareness modules.Transaction Awarenessclassifies transactions into “urgent” and “leisure” using a lightweight predictor trained on Mainnet data to forecast receiver acceptance. Based on this, leisure transactions (with low predicted acceptance) are propagated via full lazy-pull to ensure that each node receives the full payload once, while urgent transactions utilize strategically targeted eager-push guided by node awareness to rectify random selection inefficiencies.Node Awarenessidentifies hub and common nodes for urgent transaction propagation by combining a theoretical network model, enabling hub nodes to eagerly push to all peers (shortening hop count while maintaining low redundant transmission) and common nodes to leverage a peer need score to eagerly push only to high-need peers (lowering lazy-pull rate). Extensive experiments on Ethereum MainNet and in a controlled local testbed demonstrate that BELLTP significantly outperforms the current protocol in both bandwidth consumption and propagation latency.