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On the Efficiency of Dynamic Transaction Scheduling in Blockchain Sharding

Authors Ramesh Adhikari , Costas Busch , Miroslav Popovic

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Computing methodologies → Distributed algorithms
  • Theory of computation → Scheduling algorithms
Keywords
  • Blockchain
  • Blockchain Sharding
  • Dynamic Transaction Scheduling

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Abstract

Sharding is a technique to speed up transaction processing in blockchains, where the n processing nodes in the blockchain are divided into s disjoint groups (shards) that can process transactions in parallel. We study dynamic scheduling problems on a shard graph G_s where transactions arrive online over time and are not known in advance. Each transaction may access at most k shards, and we denote by d the worst distance between a transaction and its accessing (destination) shards (the parameter d is unknown to the shards). To handle different values of d, we assume a locality sensitive decomposition of G_s into clusters of shards, where every cluster has a leader shard that schedules transactions for the cluster. We first examine the simpler case of the stateless model, where leaders are not aware of the current state of the transaction accounts, and we prove a O(d log² s ⋅ min{k, √s}) competitive ratio for latency. We then consider the stateful model, where leader shards gather the current state of accounts, and we prove a O(log s⋅ min{k, √s}+log² s) competitive ratio for latency. Each leader calculates the schedule in polynomial time for each transaction that it processes. We show that for any ε > 0, approximating the optimal schedule within a (min{k, √s})^{1 -ε} factor is NP-hard. Hence, our bound for the stateful model is within a poly-log factor from the best possibly achievable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to establish provably efficient dynamic scheduling algorithms for blockchain sharding systems.

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Ramesh Adhikari, Costas Busch, and Miroslav Popovic. On the Efficiency of Dynamic Transaction Scheduling in Blockchain Sharding. In 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 356, pp. 2:1-2:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.2

Author Details

Ramesh Adhikari
  • School of Computer and Cyber Sciences, Augusta University, GA, USA
Costas Busch
  • School of Computer and Cyber Sciences, Augusta University, GA, USA
Miroslav Popovic
  • Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

Funding

This paper is supported by NSF grant CNS-2131538.

References

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