An Efficient Query Architecture for Permissioned Blockchain

Xiabin Huang, Derong Shen, Tiezheng Nie, Yue Kou, Guangyu He, Shicheng Xu

Abstract: For the existing permissioned blockchain system, consensus nodes process not only query requests but also write requests, which make themselves in a heavy workload that reduce the system’s performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture which separates part of the query tasks from the consensus nodes to the secondary nodes, and present EQblockchain, a permissioned blockchain system following this architecture, to solve the problem mentioned above. EQblockchain divides transactions into two types: one is read-transactions, the other is write-transactions. We describe how query requests, i.e., read-transactions, are processed by the consensus nodes and the secondary nodes and how write requests update the blockchain state. Because the read-transactions are processed by the consensus nodes and secondary nodes, the system throughput is significantly increased. Besides, EQblockchain constructs a few inverted indexes to support range query, which also enhances the query ability. Furthermore, we conduct several experiments to show that EQblockchain not only has efficient performance in query-heavy workload but also slightly improves the throughput of the write requests, and really has good range query ability in comparison to the baseline.