Communication-Efficient LDPC Code Design for Data Availability Oracle in Side Blockchains

TL;DR

This paper introduces a communication-efficient LDPC code design and dispersal protocol tailored for data availability in side blockchain systems, significantly reducing communication costs and improving system flexibility.

Contribution

It presents a novel LDPC code construction and dispersal protocol based on PEG, optimized for data availability oracles in side blockchains, addressing prior disjoint design limitations.

Findings

Reduces communication cost compared to previous methods

Provides a less restrictive system design

Introduces the DE-PEG algorithm for efficient dispersal

Abstract

A popular method of improving the throughput of blockchain systems is by running smaller side blockchains that push the hashes of their blocks onto a trusted blockchain. Side blockchains are vulnerable to stalling attacks where a side blockchain node pushes the hash of a block to the trusted blockchain but makes the block unavailable to other side blockchain nodes. Recently, Sheng et al. proposed a data availability oracle based on LDPC codes and a data dispersal protocol as a solution to the above problem. While showing improvements, the codes and dispersal protocol were designed disjointly which may not be optimal in terms of the communication cost associated with the oracle. In this paper, we provide a tailored dispersal protocol and specialized LDPC code construction based on the Progressive Edge Growth (PEG) algorithm, called the dispersal-efficient PEG (DE-PEG) algorithm, aimed to reduce the communication cost associated with the new dispersal protocol. Our new code construction reduces the communication cost and, additionally, is less restrictive in terms of system design.