Blockchain Synchronisation Performance Enhancement Using Forwarder Assignment in an Overlay Network

Broadcasting the block or transactions to all miners on the Internet is a major blockchain consensus feature. However, the current version of the Internet does not support broadcast/multicast functions. The miner who wins the billing right must send the block to all the miners through unicast. This operation requires a large amount of network resource to duplicate the large size of block transmission. Therefore, we attempted to improve the forward strategy in this study. An overlay network was used to construct a broadcast tree in an application, which is then mapped to the physical network. The problem is formulated as a forwarder assignment planning problem. Centralised broadcast schemes were designed to ensure forward miner selection, link construction, and the large size of block process and transmission on an overlay network. The assignment lists were included along the sending miners to avoid duplicate transmission in physical networks. An alternative IP-based method was proposed to reduce the collected bias with decentralised schemes. Finally, the experiment results demonstrate how the proposed method exhibited low delay.