A Blockchain Dynamic Sharding Scheme Based on Hidden Markov Model in Collaborative IoT

Abstract

Sharded blockchain offers scalability, decentralization, immutability, and linear improvement, making it a promising solution for addressing the trust problem in large-scale collaborative IoT. However, a high proportion of cross-shard transactions (CSTs) can severely limit the performance of decentralized blockchain. Furthermore, the dynamic assemblage characteristic of collaborative sensing in sharded blockchain is often ignored. To overcome these limitations, we propose HMMDShard, a dynamic blockchain sharding scheme based on the hidden Markov model (HMM). HMMDShard leverages fine-grained blockchain sharding and fully embraces the dynamic assemblage characteristic of IoT collaborative sensing. By integrating the HMM, we achieve adaptive dynamic incremental updating of blockchain shards, effectively reducing CSTs across all shards. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the security issues and properties of HMMDShard, and evaluate its performance through the implementation of a system prototype. The results demonstrate that HMMDShard significantly reduces the proportion of CSTs and outperforms other baselines in terms of system throughput and transaction confirmation latency.