Improving Blockchain Consensus Mechanism via Network Clusters

Abstract

Blockchain is a decentralized database that stores a growing chain of blocks formed and secured by the consensus of a network node. Blockchain technology is a solution to applications and smart programs so that no third party (peer-to-peer network) is required to store and verify transactions in a safe and reliable manner, such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, health care, and the Internet of things (IoT). However, this technology suffers from some limitations, such as network latency and slow transaction validation. In this paper, the proposed method is implemented and discussed by improving the topology of the peer-to-peer blockchain structure to a decentralized topology (structured topology in clusters). This aims to speed up transactions broadcasting time, as well as to reduce the enormous time for nodes consensus mechanism to validate transactions through the intra- and inter-cluster parallel mining in the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism. The test results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method in reducing the consensus time, as well as improve the scalability of the network.