ICOE: A Lightweight Group-Consensus-Based Off-Chain Execution Model for Smart Contract-Based Industrial Applications

Programmable smart contracts facilitate the application of blockchain to many areas of industry, e.g., supply chains, energy, and healthcare. The off-chain execution model for blockchain smart contracts is a promising approach to achieve scalability for industrial applications, which executes each smart contract in one of the small-scale consensus groups. However, previous work based on such a model cannot efficiently handle cross-group contract transactions that involve multiple cross-group invocations between smart contracts because of the heavyweight state synchronization and repeated executions. In this article, we propose interactive consensus-based off-chain execution (ICOE), a lightweight group-consensus-based off-chain execution model, for cross-group contract transactions without the need of state synchronization and duplicate executions and also prove its correctness. The key novelty of our ICOE is to let the invoked smart contract only executed in its residing group and only return the execution result to the invoking smart contract while leveraging the two-phase commit protocol to guarantee consistent commits across multiple groups within the same invoking smart contract transaction. We implement ICOE and the extensive experimental results show that our ICOE achieves a 14× improvement of throughput on average compared with the state-of-the-art model.