Pioplat: A Scalable, Low-Cost Framework for Latency Reduction in Ethereum Blockchain

TL;DR

Pioplat is a scalable, low-cost framework that uses multiple relay nodes and optimized protocols to significantly reduce latency in Ethereum, supporting latency-sensitive decentralized applications.

Contribution

It introduces Pioplat, a customizable and feasible latency reduction framework with a novel node selection strategy and communication protocol for Ethereum.

Findings

Pioplat reduces block/transaction reception latency.

Pioplat decreases transaction sending latency.

Implementation on five continents demonstrates scalability.

Abstract

As decentralized applications on permissionless blockchains are prevalent, more and more latency-sensitive usage scenarios emerged, where the lower the latency of sending and receiving messages, the better the chance of earning revenue. To reduce latency, we present Pioplat, a feasible, customizable, and low-cost latency reduction framework consisting of multiple relay nodes on different continents and at least one instrumented variant of a full node. The node selection strategy of Pioplat and the low-latency communication protocol offer an elastic way to reduce latency effectively. We demonstrate Pioplat's feasibility with an implementation running on five continents and show that Pioplat can significantly reduce the latency of receiving blocks/transactions and sending transactions, thus fulfilling the requirements of most latency-sensitive use cases. Furthermore, we provide the complete implementation of Pioplat to promote further research and allow people to apply the framework to more blockchain systems.