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Enabling Concurrency on Smart Contracts Using Multiversion Ordering

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Web and Big Data (APWeb-WAIM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10988))

Abstract

Blockchain-based platforms, such as Ethereum, allow transactions in blocks to call user-defined scripts named smart contracts. In the blockchain network, after being generated by a miner, a block will be validated many times by the peers who accept it. Hence by enabling concurrency on smart contracts, especially validation, we can improve the efficiency and the throughput of those platforms.

By introducing multiversion transaction ordering, this paper presents a concurrent scheme called MVTO to run smart contracts concurrently. First, the miners are able to use any concurrency control technique to discover a conflict-serializable schedule. Then, validators use MVTO to verify the block by replaying this schedule concurrently and deterministically. The evaluation shows that this mechanism achieves approximately 2.5x speedup in the block validation using a thread pool with 3 threads.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A serial schedule is a schedule where transaction are executed serially and do not interleave each other.

  2. 2.

    The update action can be divided into a read and a write action.

  3. 3.

    This transaction order is also the serial order in the mining phase.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    An Zhang & Kunlong Zhang

Authors
  1. An Zhang
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  2. Kunlong Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to An Zhang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

    Yi Cai

  2. Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Yoshiharu Ishikawa

  3. Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China

    Jianliang Xu

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Cite this paper

Zhang, A., Zhang, K. (2018). Enabling Concurrency on Smart Contracts Using Multiversion Ordering. In: Cai, Y., Ishikawa, Y., Xu, J. (eds) Web and Big Data. APWeb-WAIM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10988. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96893-3_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96893-3_32

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96892-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96893-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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