PiChu: Accelerating Block Broadcasting in Blockchain Networks with Pipelining and Chunking

Abstract: Blockchain technologies have been rapidly enhanced in recent years. However, its scalability still has limitations in terms of throughput and broadcast delay as the network and the amount of transaction data increase. To improve scalability of blockchain networks, we propose a novel approach named PiChu that accelerates block propagation in blockchain networks by pipelining and verifying chunks of a block in parallel. Accelerating block propagation reduces the mining interval and chance of fork occurring, which in turn increases throughput. Our approach can be applied to the blockchain networks either directly or with a minor modification to the consensus. Through an extensive and large scale simulations, we validate that the proposed PiChu scheme significantly enhances the scalability of blockchain networks. For instance, a 64 MB block can be broadcasted in just 80 seconds in a blockchain network with a million nodes. The efficiency of PiChu broadcasting increases with bigger block sizes and a larger number of nodes in the network.