FRing: A Geography-based P2P Overlay Network for Fast and Robust Blockchain Systems


Project FRing includes a noval peer-to-peer overlay network protocol that improves communication efficiency and security among peers, and an implementation of the protocol in C++.

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Introduction


Blockchain is essentially a public decentralized ledger that securely records transactions between parties anonymously. The key component is to reach agreement among a group of nodes, i.e., consensus. However, based on current Peer-to-Peer network, the broadcast operation is inefficient. Increasing transaction rate leads to traffic congestion.

Intel SGX is a technology which protects code and execution integrity from hardware perspective. It provides chances to modify the network protocol and store some routing information, in order to reduce as many messages as possible and meanwhile retain the properties required by the blockchain application on top of the network.

This project targets this weakness of the P2P network under blockchain systems, designing and implementing a new protocol in the Peer-to-Peer network which achieves effciency and do not sacrifice any security or any other required properties.

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Methodology


Protocol Design

We are going to find what researchers were doing on improving the performance of peer-to-peer network and figure our what is preventing them from making it more efficient. After having done literature review about peer-to-peer network and Intel SGX, we can think about how to make use of Intel SGX to mitigate the problem unsolved.

System Implementation

We will first do some research on existing blockchain systems such as GEEC and extract the peer-to-peer network layer from them. Modifying the network layer and then integrate it with the original system.

System Evaluation

After having the system working, we are going to evaluate our system compared to other existing blockchain systems on running the same applications like database, cryptocurrency, etc..

Timeline


Results and Deliverables


This project will deliver a new protocol for Peer-to-Peer network which improves the performance of the communication among peers in the network such as the broadcast operation. The protocol should not sacrifice any property in the original protocol needed in the blockchain. Based on the protocol, this project will also deliver a whole blockchain system, implementing the protocol on some existing blockchain systems like GEEC and ByzCoin. The project will also give an evaluation on the performance of various blockchain systems in which it is expected to have higher efficiency.

Documentations



Our Team


Haoran Qiu

Team member


Tao Ji

Team member


Dr. Heming Cui

Supervisor