Paper 2024/1884

Age-aware Fairness in Blockchain Transaction Ordering for Reducing Tail Latency

Abstract

In blockchain networks, transaction latency is crucial for determining the quality of service (QoS). The latency of a transaction is measured as the time between its issuance and its inclusion in a block in the chain. A block proposer often prioritizes transactions with higher fees or transactions from accounts it is associated with, to minimize their latencies. To maintain fairness among transactions, a block proposer is expected to select the included transactions randomly. The random selection might cause some transactions to experience high latency following the variance in the time a transaction waits until it is selected. We suggest an alternative, age-aware approach towards fairness so that transaction priority is increased upon observing a large waiting time. We explain that a challenge with this approach is that the age of a transaction is not absolute due to transaction propagation. Moreover, a node might present its transactions as older to obtain priority. We describe a new technique to enforce a fair block selection while prioritizing transactions that observed high latency. The technique is based on various declaration schemes in which a node declares its pending transactions, providing the ability to validate transaction age. By evaluating the solutions on Ethereum data and synthetic data of various scenarios, we demonstrate the advantages of the approach under realistic conditions and understand its potential impact to maintain fairness and reduce tail latency.