LARCH: Blockchain sharding technique using latency-aware ring consistent hashing

Abstract Blockchain is a promising technology widely used across domains such as finance, education, and health care. However, scalability is a vital challenge that diminishes the overall performance of the Blockchain. To enhance its performance and scalability, divide the Blockchain network into smaller partitions. This technique is known as sharding, and each partition is called as a shard. Despite extensive research on sharding Blockchain to secure shards and improve performance by assuming basic sharding techniques, communication issues persist, limiting their performance. Thus, there is a need to develop an effective network sharding technique to improve the scalability and performance in terms of transaction latency and throughput of Blockchain. This paper introduces Latency-Aware Ring Consistent Hashing (LARCH named as C-shard) for sharding of Blockchain to improve performance by communicating directly with their respective shards and nodes. Our extensive simulation results using C-Shard achieve 63.70%, 56.89%, and 50.73% less latency and throughput increased up to 146.64%, 98.42%, and 102.08% in comparison to G-shard, R-shard, and K-shard.