Packet Aggregation Scheme to Mitigate the Network Congestion in Blockchain Networks

This paper proposes a packet aggregation scheme for reducing a network overload and mitigating bottle-neck in byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) based blockchain network. In a plain blockchain network, the traffic may explosively increase due to the broadcasting packets generated by consensus procedure. The proposed scheme is composed of C-mode and X-mode. The modes can be implemented by customizing the routing policy in software-defined networking (SDN). C-mode concatenates packets into the single packet. X-mode exploits exclusive-or (XOR) operation to combine two packets into one packet. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with a plain network in terms of traffic volume and processing time to complete the practical BFT. For the performance evaluation, we implement the virtual SDN simulator which shows that the proposed scheme reduces the PBFT processing time by 23% and thus can mitigate network congestion.