Meepo: Multiple Execution Environments per Organization in Sharded Consortium Blockchain

Blockchain performance cannot meet the requirement nowadays. One of the crucial ways to improve performance is sharding. However, most blockchain sharding research focuses on the public blockchain. As for consortium blockchain, previous studies cannot support high cross-shard efficiency, multiple-shard contract calling, strict transaction atomicity, and shard availability, which are essential requirements but also challenges in consortium blockchain systems. Facing these challenges, we propose Meepo, a systematic study on sharded consortium blockchain. Meepo enhances cross-shard efficiency via the cross-epoch and cross-call. Moreover, a partial cross-call merging strategy is designed to handle the multi-state dependency in contract calls, achieving flexible multiple-shard contract calling. Meepo employs a replay-epoch to ensure strict transaction atomicity, and it also uses a backup algorithm called shadow shard based recovery to improve the shard robustness. On a test-bed of 128 AliCloud servers, setting 32 shards and 4 consortium members, MeepoOpenEtheruem can achieve more than 140,000 cross-shard TPS under the workload of 100,000,000 asset transactions. It also shows more than 50,000 TPS under the transactions of real-world shopping behaviors.

Automated summary

This article introduces a systematic study on sharded consortium blockchain, proposing a solution called Meepo to improve cross-shard efficiency through cross-epoch and cross-call strategies. It also designs a partial cross-call merging strategy to handle multi-state dependency in contract calls, and employs replay-epoch and shadow shard based recovery algorithm to ensure strict transaction atomicity and enhance shard robustness. In performance testing, Meepo demonstrates high throughput in cross-shard transactions.