GT-NRSM: efficient and scalable sharding consensus mechanism for consortium blockchain

Blockchain is an innovative application of distributed storage, consensus mechanism, cryptographic algorithm, and other computer technologies. As the underlying architecture of blockchain, consensus is the key to realizing service-oriented applications of blockchain in terms of its security, efficiency, and scalability optimization. In some high-complexity consensus, such as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), throughput is severely reduced as the number of nodes increases. Even in low-complexity algorithms such as Raft, the load on the leader is severely affected as the network size increases, negatively affecting consensus efficiency. To solve these problems, we propose a node reliable shard model based on guarantee tree that achieves high scalability while maintaining a certain degree of decentralization and security based on consortium blockchain. Firstly, we create a guarantee mechanism to represent the trust relationship between nodes, and then, we design a reliable node selection strategy based on the guarantee mechanism to evaluate the node guarantee results and consensus behavior, determine the node trust status, and identify malicious nodes and choose a list of trusted leaders. Secondly, we propose a Dual-Leaders supervision mechanism, in which the deputy senses the heartbeat of leader while the deputy activity is detected by consensus nodes. Finally, we use a guarantee mechanism and reliable node selection strategy to design a network partitioning method to achieve high concurrent consensus for multiple partitions and significantly improve consensus efficiency. Subsequent experiments show that the throughput of the proposed algorithm improves by 48% over Raft and is significantly greater than PBFT, which has better throughput but lower consensus latency.