arXiv subjects

Arman Babaei

Publications and source records attributed to Arman Babaei.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

CHIRON: Accelerating Node Synchronization without Security Trade-offs in Distributed Ledgers

Blockchain performance has historically faced challenges posed by the throughput limitations of consensus algorithms. Recent breakthroughs in research have successfully alleviated these constraints by introducing a modular architecture that decouples consensus from execution. The move toward independent optimization of the consensus layer has shifted attention to the execution layer. While concurrent transaction execution is a promising solution for increasing throughput, practical challenges persist. Its effectiveness varies based on the workloads, and the associated increased hardware requirements raise concerns about undesirable centralization. This increased requirement results in full nodes and stragglers synchronizing from signed checkpoints, decreasing the trustless nature of blockchain systems. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces Chiron, a system designed to extract execution hints for the acceleration of straggling and full nodes. Notably, Chiron achieves this without compromising the security of the system or introducing overhead on the critical path of consensus. Evaluation results demonstrate a notable speedup of up to 30%, effectively addressing the gap between theoretical research and practical deployment. The quantification of this speedup is achieved through realistic blockchain benchmarks derived from a comprehensive analysis of Ethereum and Solana workloads, constituting an independent contribution.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Tit-for-Token: Understanding Fairness when Forwarding Data by Incentivized Peers in Decentralized Storage Networks

Decentralized storage networks offer services with intriguing possibilities to reduce inequalities in an extremely centralized market. The challenge is to conceive incentives that are fair in regard to the income distribution among peers. Despite many systems using tokens to incentivize forwarding data, like Swarm, little is known about the interplay between incentives, storage-, and network-parameters. This paper aims to help fill this gap by developing Tit-for-Token (Tit4Tok), a framework to understand fairness. Tit4Tok realizes a triad of altruism (acts of kindness such as debt forgiveness), reciprocity (Tit-for-Tat's mirroring cooperation), and monetary rewards as desired in the free market. Tit4Tok sheds light on incentives across the accounting and settlement layers. We present a comprehensive exploration of different factors when incentivized peers share bandwidth in a libp2p-based network, including uneven distributions emerging when gateways provide data to users outside the network. We quantified the Income-Fairness with the Gini coefficient, using multiple model instantiations and diverse approaches for debt cancellation. We propose regular changes to the gateway neighborhood and show that our shuffling method improves the Income-Fairness from 0.66 to 0.16. We quantified the non-negligible cost of tolerating free-riding (altruism). The performance is evaluated by extensive computer simulations and using an IPFS workload to study the effects of caching.

cs.NI↗