Enabling Efficient Cross-Shard Smart Contract Calling via Overlapping
Zixu Zhang, Hongbo Yin, Ying Wang, Guangsheng Yu, Xu Wang, Wei Ni, Ren Ping Liu
Provable and Practical Security: 18th International Conference, ProvSec 2024
As blockchain networks grow, sharding offers a promising solution to scalability challenges by dividing the network into smaller segments. However, managing cross-shard transactions, especially those involving smart contract calling, introduces significant complexities due to the extensive coordination required between shards. This paper introduces a novel framework for blockchain architectures with overlapping shards to address these challenges in cross-shard smart contract calling. The framework introduces overlapping shards and an optimized PBFT consensus mechanism, xPBFT. This framework simplifies cross-shard transaction management by treating them as intra-shard activities, reducing latency and improving security by enabling nodes to operate across multiple shards. Through experimental results, it is demonstrate that this framework decreases latency by up to 40% compared to traditional PBFT methods while effectively maintaining transaction security.