A Fault-Tolerant Sharding Mechanism for Resilience and Scalability in Blockchain Using Backup Pool

<p dir="ltr">With the development of blockchain technology, an increasing number of devices are joining the network and generating numerous transactions, which pose significant performance and scalability challenges to blockchain networks. Sharding technology is one solution that improves throughput by parallelising transaction validation and block generation, thereby alleviating this challenge. However, during the process of dividing shard groups in large-scale networks, the uneven distribution of malicious nodes or dynamic changes in joined nodes may lead to failures in the availability and liveness of shard groups. This paper proposes an enhanced sharding blockchain system that improves fault tolerance and reliability to ensure high shard group performance, scalability, and reliability. We also propose the concept of a backup pool and achieve the detection and recovery of faulty shards through pre-deployed backup pool nodes and redesigned consensus algorithms. After a thorough security analysis, we conclude that the proposed sharding blockchain system can increase the Resilience of shard groups from 33.3% to 66.6%. Additionally, we evaluate the proposed system, and the results show that it ensures the security, reliability, and high performance of sharding while increasing the scalability of the system’s network nodes from 10⁴ to 10⁶ compared to existing sharding blockchains.</p>