ALTO-assisted Peer Selection in Bitcoin P2P Network

Blockchain-based applications rely on a decentralized structure wherein the transactions are recorded on a public ledger that is maintained by every node in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The transactions and blocks are propagated using a multi-hop broadcast and verified by every node in the network. Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO), on the other hand, is a network protocol developed and maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to provide network related information to the P2P applications to increase their performance. In this study, a novel peer selection method based on the network information provided by ALTO protocol is proposed to decrease the block propagation delay of the Bitcoin P2P network. The simulations show that the proposed peer selection method can effectively decrease the block propagation time and fork rate compared to Bitcoin’s random peer selection and region-based peer selection methods.