LightBlock: Reducing Bandwidth Required to Synchronize Blocks in Ethereum Network

Recently, with the vigorous development of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Ethereum blockchain, the economic value and user scale of Ethereum keep growing. However, the low transaction processing capability of Ethereum prevents its further development. One factor that limits the transaction processing capability is the bandwidth required to synchronize the blocks over the nodes in the Ethereum network. This work proposes a new block synchronization protocol, referred to as LightBlock, which is dedicated to reducing the bandwidth used by the Ethereum network to disseminate messages. The LightBlock protocol is of great significance to the improvement of TPS. Since Ethereum's block synchronization protocol is a kind of gossip protocol, the redundant message propagation is its inherent shortcoming. In the LightBlock protocol, we use transaction Hash to replace the transaction of the original block to form a LightBlock structure. The propagation of LightBlock structure requires a much smaller bandwidth resource than the propagation of the original block has. Moreover, in order to reduce the communication overhead of the new protocol, each node needs to predict the missing transactions of its neighbor nodes before propagating the LightBlock strcuture. Therefore, we set up three models to measure the similarity of the current Ethereum node transaction pool and other parameters. Through analysis, the size of LightBlock is reduced by an average of 83.55% compared to the size of the current block; after adding the function of predicting missing transactions, the probability of not increasing the number of additional communications increases from 0.2 to 0.398.