Intelligent System for Improving Scalability by Sharding for Agriculture Supply Chain

Experts attribute the success of Bitcoin to its underlying public and permissionless blockchain technology. Permissionless blockchains offer solutions to various worldly challenges, from eCommerce to governance and arbitration. However, the agriculture supply chain is a crucial sector that deserves attention. Many blockchain-based agriculture traceability systems have been developed by recent researchers using blockchain and smart contracts. While existing systems achieve security and decentralization on a large scale, they suffer from severe performance and scalability limitations. This work introduces a blockchain traceability system for the Agriculture Supply Chain (ASC) using a Proof of Stake (PoS) sharding approach to enhance scalability and operational efficiency. The proposed system comprises a coord layer, sharding layer, cross shard, and communication layer implemented using Python and the MPICH message passing library. The system distributes the computational workload among a specified number of nodes across the network, leveraging the sharding mechanism to achieve higher transaction throughput limits. The simulation results reveal that with a consistent throughput, an increase in transactions leads to longer processing times when the shard count remains the same. However, when the shard count increases, there is a significant improvement in throughput, albeit with a higher number of nodes and longer processing times. Therefore, the proposed system demonstrates enhanced throughput in sharded systems compared to existing systems.