An Efficient and Scalable Consensus for Main Blockchain in the Multi-Chain Network

Xinlu Zhuang, Zeyu Xiao, Haoping Qin, Yunjie Ge

Abstract: While blockchain technology has gained significant popularity and adoption, auditing the legitimacy of on-chain transactions continues to present complex technical challenges. To address the challenge of auditing the legitimacy of on-chain transactions in multi-chain systems, this paper proposes an Auditing-Service Multi-Chain architecture that utilizes a new Auditing Chain to facilitate cross-chain auditing of transactions across multiple Service Chains. However, the performance of the consensus mechanism of the Auditing Chain is limited under the increasing number of Service Chains and transaction volumes. To overcome the shortcomings of the Auditing Chain's consensus mechanism, this paper introduces a new consensus that employs a sliding window approach to determine the consensus nodes' membership and automatically selects the leader node. Moreover, the communication tree structure is utilized in the broadcast phase to optimize the network overhead in the consensus stage. Additionally, this paper applies the CoSi collective signature protocol to streamline the consensus process and enhance the throughput and scalability of the Auditing Chain. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed consensus mechanism satisfies the performance requirements of the Auditing-Service Multi-Chain architecture in a local test network environment.