Abstract:
The emergence of blockchains as a way to organize and protect user data across the internet has come with some concerns,
mainly how to deal with the issue of scalability while still maintaining the security standards as well as the decentralized nature
inherent to blockchains. Many different implementations will be elicited in this work, resort to the concept of sharding, consisting
of partitioning a blockchain into smaller clusters which would, with proper load-balancing, drastically improve the performance of
the overall chain. First, we will explore the existing literature on the subject as well as related algorithms. Then provide a detailed
explanation of the functioning of the existing algorithms, both centralized and decentralized, as well as the one proposed in this
paper. Next, we will then elicit the settings and conditions of the simulation environment, both in terms of data collection and
preparation. Finally, we will provide the results obtained as well as a comparative analysis of the tested algorithms and give an
overview of possible future endeavors in the advancement of load-balancing algorithms in respect to sharded Blockchains.
