DC-Gossip: An Enhanced Broadcast Protocol in Hyperledger Fabric Based on Density Clustering

Low transaction efficiency remains one of the primary constraints to the development of permission blockchain. To enhance the communication performance of blockchain, the majority of research focuses on optimizing the local architecture of blockchain and improving consensus. In practice, increasing the block dissemination capability at the network layer can significantly improve transaction efficiency. We find that the redundancy and instability of the gossip protocol as a broadcast method in Hyperledger Fabric have a significant impact on communication performance. In this work, we introduce the idea of density clustering to propose the DC-Gossip broadcast protocol, constructing a stable network architecture with highly dense connectivity for the blockchain network layer. This architecture can effectively reduce the propagation latency and ensure the integrity of the distributed ledger. In our experiments with Fabric, DC-Gossip reduces latency by more than 19% after 40 blocks are propagated in a stable network environment with more than 100 nodes. Moreover, the latency decreases by 14% in a dynamic network under the identical circumstances.