RT-Blockchain: Achieving Time-Predictable Transactions

Although blockchain technology is being increasingly utilized across various fields, the challenge of providing timing guarantees for transactions remains unmet, which is an obstacle in implementing blockchain solutions for time-sensitive applications such as high-frequency trading and real-time payments. In this paper, we propose the first solution to achieve a timing guarantee on blockchain. To this end, we raise and address two issues for timely transactions on a blockchain: (a) architectural support, and (b) real-time scheduling principles specialized for blockchain. For (a), we modify an existing blockchain network, offering an interface to preferentially select the transactions with the earliest deadlines. We then extend the blockchain network to provide the flexibility of the number of generated blocks at a single block time. Under such architectural supports, we achieve (b) with three steps. First, to resolve a discrepancy between a periodic request of a transaction-generating node and the corresponding arrival on a block-generating node, we translate the former into the latter, which eases the modeling of the transaction load imposed on the blockchain network. Second, we derive a schedulability condition of the modeled transaction load, which guarantees no missed deadline for all transactions under a work-conserving deadline-based scheduling policy. Last, we develop a lazy scheduling policy and its condition, which reduces the number of generated blocks without compromising the degree of timing guarantees for the work-conserving policy. By implementing RT-blockchain on top of an existing open-source blockchain project, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling principles with architectural supports in not only ensuring timely transactions but also reducing the number of generating blocks.