The Design of Hierarchical Consensus Mechanism Based on Service-Zone Sharding

The byzantine agreement protocol has a disadvantage that there are many limitations on node scalability, because the performance degradation may occur due to a large amount of traffic. Hence, this classical byzantine agreement algorithm seems to be infeasible to achieve scale-out performance with the same level of security as a Bitcoin. In order to improve the performance degradation due to a large amount of traffic, we propose the hierarchical consensus mechanism based on service-zone sharding rather than how all nodes participate in the consensus process. In the proposed consensus mechanism (SZHBFT), a disjoint set of transactions is locally processed by a secure consensus subgroup or globally processed between consensus subgroups. Thus, the transactions that occur related to multiple Service-Zone Consensus Groups are updated and maintained in the Inter-Service Zone Public Ledger, whereas service transactions occurring locally are processed in parallel by each Service-Zone Consensus Group and then distributed into a local Service-Zone Private Ledger. The scheme of the proposed SZHBFT mechanism provides the hierarchical agreement solution along with distributed multiledger structure for the scalable byzantine resilient agreement by forming secure consensus subgroups in order to minimize the overhead of overall communication messages.