Dissertation Proposal - University of Houston
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Dissertation Proposal

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Zhimin Gao

will defend his dissertation proposal

Shared-Ledger - Possibility and Improvement


Abstract

Blockchain, or distributed ledger, provides a way to build various decentralized systems without relying on any single trusted party. This is especially attractive for smart contract. Different parties do not need to trust each other to sign a contract, and the distributed ledger can guarantee correct execution of the contract and corresponding results. Most existing distributed ledger based smart contract systems process smart contracts in a serial way, i.e., all users have to run a contract before its results can be accepted by the system. Although this approach is easy to implement and manage, it is not scalable and greatly limits the capability of the system to handle a large number of smart contracts. In order to address this problem, we propose a scalable smart contract execution scheme that can run multiple smart contract in parallel to improve throughput of the system. Our scheme relies on two key techniques: a fair contract partition algorithm leveraging integer linear programming to partition a set of smart contracts into multiple subsets, and a secure assignment protocol assigning subsets randomly to a subgroup of users. We also conduct experiment with data from existing smart contract system. The results demonstrate that our approach is scalable and much more efficient than existing systems.


Date: Friday, April 28, 2017
Time: 1:30 PM
Place: PGH 550
Advisors: Dr. Weidong Shi, Dr. Stephen Huang, Dr. Guoning Chen, Dr. Lei Wu

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.