Better Clients, Less Conflicts: Hyperledger Fabric Conflict Avoidance

Hyperledger Fabric, a prominent permissioned blockchain platform, offers concurrent transaction processing via its Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) feature. However, conflicts arise when multiple transactions access the same data, severely impacting Fabric’s throughput. To reduce transaction conflicts, we draw inspiration from CSMA/CA, a wireless network medium access control protocol that uses Randomized Exponential Backoff (REB) to avoid packet collisions. Based on REB, we design Fabric/CA, a client-side transaction submission protocol designed to reduce transaction conflicts. By mitigating the computational waste caused by conflicts, Fabric/CA substantially improves Fabric’s performance. Our experiments show that under a high-contention workload, Fabric/CA achieves a reduction of over $98 \%$ in transaction conflicts, and boosts Fabric’s goodput by more than 10x.