Nezha: Exploiting Concurrency for Transaction Processing in DAG-based Blockchains

Abstract

A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based blockchain with its inherent parallel structure can potentially significantly improve the throughput performance over conventional blockchains. Such a performance improvement can be further enhanced through concurrent transaction processing. This, however, brings new challenges in concurrency control design in that there is an increased number of concurrent reads and writes to the same address in a DAG-based blockchain, which leads to a considerable rise of potential conflicts. Therefore, one critical problem is how to effectively and efficiently detect and order conflicting transactions. In this work, for the first time, we aim to improve system throughput and processing latency by exploring the address dependencies among different transactions. We propose NEZHA, an efficient concurrency control scheme for DAG-based blockchains. Specifically, NEZHA intelligently constructs an address-based conflict graph (ACG) while incorporating address dependencies as edges to capture all conflicting transactions. To generate a total order between transactions, we propose a hierarchical sorting (HS) algorithm to derive sorting ranks of addresses based on the ACG and sort transactions on each address. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, even under high data contention, NEZHA can increase the throughput over the conventional conflict graph scheme by up to 8 ×, while decreasing the transaction processing latency up to 10 ×.