TIPS: Transaction Inclusion Protocol with Signaling in DAG-based Blockchain

TL;DR

TIPS is a protocol designed for DAG-based blockchains that reduces transaction collisions and improves performance by signaling transaction inclusion, while also defending against certain attacks, demonstrated through extensive experiments.

Contribution

Introduces TIPS, a signaling-based protocol that significantly reduces transaction collisions and enhances security in DAG-based blockchain systems.

Findings

Reduces transaction collision rate in DAG-based blockchains

Improves system throughput and revenue stability

Provides defense against DoS and delay-of-service attacks

Abstract

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a popular approach to achieve scalability of blockchain networks. Due to its high efficiency in data communication and great scalability, DAG has been widely adopted in many applications such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). DAG-based blockchain, nevertheless, faces the key challenge of transaction inclusion collision due to the high concurrency and the network delay. Particularly, the transaction inclusion collision in DAG-based blockchain leads to the revenue and throughput dilemmas, which would greatly degrade the system performance. In this paper, we propose "TIPS", the Transaction Inclusion Protocol with Signaling, which broadcasts a signal indicating the transactions in the block. We show that with the prompt broadcast of a signal, TIPS substantially reduces the transaction collision and thus resolves these dilemmas. Moreover, we show that TIPS can defend against both the denial-of-service and the delay-of-service attacks. We also conduct intensive experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed protocol.