PeloPartition: Improving Blockchain Resilience to Network Partitioning

Abstract

Blockchain has gained considerable traction over the last few years and plays a critical role in realizing decentralized and cryptocurrency applications. A challenge that has been over-looked in prior blockchain algorithms is that they do not consider large-scale network outages and relied on the assumption of a reliable global network connectivity. In the event of a large scale network partition, forks may occur between partitioned regions. After the partition ends they will be discarded, leading to the loss of many blocks and a considerable amount of wasted work. This paper presents PeloPartition, which provides a sharding mechanism to improve blockchain's resilience to the possibility of a global internet outage. In PeloPartition we form consensus groups dynamically and consider the partitioning of the group as a hint to split the blockchain into branches and guarantee that all of them will be merged after the network is recovered. We indicate different methodologies to ensure blockchain security while partitioning occurs. Our experiments use simulations to show how this approach can improve the performance of blockchain algorithms and prevent wasted computational power during partitioning.