Apex: A High-Performance Hierarchical Distributed Ledger

Marc X. Makkes, Robert Diebels

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Designing a secure permission distributed ledger that has the same performance a centralized counterpart, such as Visa, is a challenging task. The majority of available distributed ledgers are unable to scale to that degree. To increase the number of transactions per second, we can either compromise on security or partition the Blockchain.Here, we present Apex, a novel hierarchical distributed ledger that increases the overall performance by 1) partitioning groups of nodes into smaller concurrent distributed ledgers 2) limiting how transactions can flow to the system while guaranteeing the security and 3) combining blocks of each partition into a separate aggregated distributed ledger. Apex is designed for use-cases that require public and transparent accounting such as intellectual property rights in the music industry. An evaluation of our experimental prototype shows that Apex's throughput scales linearly with the number of active nodes while transaction confirmation is less than two seconds. By applying these tree constructs we achieve almost linear speedup in terms of transactions per second simultaneously lowering latency and verification computation-cost per node.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2019 Sixth International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security (IOTSMS)
EditorsMohammad Alsmirat, Yaser Jararweh
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages466-473
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781728129495
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 Dec 2019
Event6th International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security, IOTSMS 2019 - Granada, Spain
Duration: 22 Oct 201925 Oct 2019

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security, IOTSMS 2019
Country/TerritorySpain
CityGranada
Period22/10/1925/10/19

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Apex: A High-Performance Hierarchical Distributed Ledger'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this