Title: Hierarchical bucket tree: an efficient account structure for blockchain-based system

Authors: Weili Chen; Zibin Zheng; Mingjie Ma; Pinjia He; Yuren Zhou; Jing Bian

Addresses: School of Data and Computer Science; National Engineering Research Center of Digital Life, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China ' School of Data and Computer Science; National Engineering Research Center of Digital Life, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China ' School of Data and Computer Science; National Engineering Research Center of Digital Life, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China ' Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland ' School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China; The Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Computational Science, Guangzhou, China ' School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China; The Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Computational Science, Guangzhou, China

Abstract: Systems built on top of blockchain are often inefficient. One reason for the inefficiency is that these systems include too many hash operations. To address this problem, we conduct an empirical study on the transaction history of a real-world blockchain-based system (i.e., Ethereum), which contains 300,821 accounts and 14,240,095 transactions. We found that the account usage frequency is highly heterogeneous. Based on this finding, this paper presents hierarchy bucket tree (HBT), an efficient account structure with user transaction behaviour information embedded, to reduce the number of hash operations and thus enhance the efficiency of blockchain-based systems. Extensive experiments have been conducted and the experimental results show that HBT reduces hash operations by nearly 80% compared with the existing account structure.

Keywords: blockchain; Ethereum; tree structure; hyperledger; account structure; hash operation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2020.107638

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2020 Vol.12 No.4, pp.554 - 566

Received: 13 Jul 2018
Accepted: 23 Jan 2019
Published online: 03 Jun 2020 *

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