COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Daniel Doe
TITLE: OPTIMIZING ETHEREUM BLOCK PROPAGATION: A STACKELBERG GAME-THEORETIC APPROACH IN MIXED REALITY ENVIRONMENTS
ABSTRACT: Scalability is a persistent bottleneck in Ethereum-based blockchain networks, particularly for mixed reality applications like augmented and virtual reality that require low latency and consistent real-time performance. Peer-to-peer gossip protocols, the standard mechanism for block propagation, introduce measurable delays and redundant transmissions that break the realtime synchronization these environments depend on. When propagation takes seconds, user experience degrades and interactive responsiveness collapses; conventional blockchain infrastructure simply was not designed for latency-sensitive mixed reality workloads. This thesis presents a Stackelberg game-theoretic incentive mechanism for optimizing Ethereum block propagation in mixed reality environments. The blockchain protocol acts as a Stackelberg leader, announcing a unit reward price, while heterogeneous edge relayers act as strategic followers that independently set their forwarding participation levels based on their own operational costs, latency factors, and capacity constraints. Aligning economic rewards with latency aware forwarding behavior encourages rational relayer participation and coordinated block dissemination without centralized control. A closed-form characterization of the Stackelberg equilibrium is derived, and a computationally efficient iterative algorithm computes the equilibrium price and participation profile. The framework accounts for relayer heterogeneity in bandwidth, processing capability, and communication delay, which allows selective activation of the most efficient relayers under varying network conditions. Monte Carlo simulations under realistic heterogeneous relayer conditions and varying network sizes show that the proposed mechanism achieves consistently low transaction latency, stable propagation success rates that exceed unstructured gossip dissemination, competitive protocol utility, and fast equilibrium convergence. Comparative evaluations against cost-based relaying, latency-greedy selection, random gossip, and sharding-based propagation confirm that the Stackelberg Incentive Mechanism delivers a balanced and scalable trade-off between reliability, responsiveness, and economic efficiency. Incentive-driven propagation strategies, these results show, can support scalable and responsive blockchain infrastructure for immersive mixed reality applications.
Keywords: Ethereum, blockchain scalability, stackelberg game, block propagation, mixed reality
Room Location: Electrical Engineering Conference Room 315D