Design and implementation of NDN-based Ethereum blockchain

Blockchain technology allows public parties to agree on a common state without relying on a central authority. Despite it brings many innovative use cases, the technology is still in its early stage that needs improving on many aspects. One of the issues is to deliver blockchain data more efficiently. Named Data Networking (NDN), a new network paradigm, is designed to make content distribution with ease by enabling in-network caching and built-in multicasting, which blockchain technologies can take advantage. Moreover, blockchain may contribute to extending NDN application ecosystems including decentralized applications. Therefore, it is instrumental to have a working blockchain system that runs on NDN platform to supports its research and development. In this work, we design and implement an NDN-based Ethereum blockchain platform. We propose new protocols for propagating blockchain data making full use of NDN features for the delivery of transactions and blocks. Our experiments show that the distribution of blockchain data in NDN is more efficient than that of IP network. The latency of block delivery is also reduced, which in turn supports tuning blockchain parameter for better security. Our developed blockchain client is freely distributed as an open-source project. We hope that it can provide a platform to foster blockchain research on NDN in the future.