Hello I am just wondering can we improve the efficiency and reduce the latency if we cluster nodes based on the longitude and longitude(for example with K-means clustering) coordinate on existing shards, thus to have smaller groups with neighbors that are close enough to eliminate network bottlenecks. Will this be an efficient approach or it would be a security breach cause we divide the majority of network participation? Please feel free to share your thoughts
1 Answer
That's a good question. As per my knowledge, there are actually a method that also use the same idea. It is called as geographical sharding. But, I do not see any application of this in blockchain yet. A great method so far that may help to improve efficiency and reduce latency of blochchain network. However, I have the following concern of doing clustering node as
(i) Clustering node may not follow the nature of blockchain (correct me if I'm wrong :D) because we have to divide the network into smaller, even isolated group.
(ii) If somehow a significant portion of the network's node are located in a cluster => This will create a single point of failure that can make the blockchain corrupted.
(iii) Also, with fewer nodes in each clustering, there is a greater risk that a single node failure could cause a chain split or other network disruption.
I believe scaling blockchain network will be a crucial topic in the future so far. Lots of research and talk about using Bayesian method, data-driven (clustering) method are on air. And, soon, we will have a great proposal for scaling blockchain network. Hope to see other expert ideas in that question.
