FLPSHARD: A Flexible and Efficient Blockchain Sharding Solution for IIoT

The introduction of blockchain sharding technology in IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) can leverage the scalability, decentralization, and immutability of blockchain to significantly enhance security. However, existing IIoT operations are highly correlated with business and geographical locations, as well as network conditions, making traditional random sharding schemes unsuitable for such scenarios. To address this issue, we propose the FLPShard model, a method that transforms the sharding problem into a single-source capacitated facility location problem (SSCFLP). FLPShard can handle multiple constraints simultaneously and allows multiple nodes to be bundled and allocated as a whole, meeting the demands of IIoT. By constructing neighborhoods during the dynamic adjustment process, we achieve dynamic incremental updates and automatic splitting of blockchain shards. We evaluated FLPShard by building a system prototype, and the results show that, compared to random sharding algorithms, FLPShard significantly increases system throughput and greatly reduces transaction latency.