Traditional Chinese Medicine Traceability System Based on Sharding Blockchain (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Abstract: Nowadays, Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) safety issues have attracted attention from both industry and academia. Counterfeit drugs not only have a serious harmful impact on human health but also cause heavy economic loss to the industry. Establishing a reliable drug traceability system to prevent fake drugs’ safety issues is necessary. Most traditional drug traceability systems are centralized, which leads to data privacy, transparency, and data tampering. Blockchain, a promising technology for decentralization, tamper-resistant and privacy-preserving, provides a basis for the complete traceability of drugs. However, blockchain also has some issues such as high computation overhead, storage overhead, limited scalability, and low transaction throughput. Sharding has emerged as a well approach that can overcome the above issues in blockchain. Sharding is dividing the network into multiple smaller groups, these smaller groups can work in parallel on disjoint transactions. In this paper, we propose a lightweight blockchain architecture based on sharding to solve the above issues in TCM traceability system (LBS-TCM). Our architecture consists of two blockchains, namely: leader shard blockchain and sub shard blockchain. The leader shard blockchain saves all states and processes cross-shard transactions. The sub shard blockchain deals with transactions within shards. LBS-TCM also supports state sharding, transaction sharding, and ledger pruning. Our empirical evaluations suggest that our proposed architecture can process more than 1500 tx/sec in a network of 2048 nodes and 64 shards. The storage overhead of each node decreases linearly.