# A Blockchain Network Communication Architecture Based on Information-Centric Networking
## 1 Introduction  
As a type of distributed ledger technology, blockchain technology has been widely applied in fields such as finance [1], Internet of Things [2], and healthcare [3], due to its characteristics of decentralization and immutability. However, existing mainstreamblockchain systems face significant performance issues and cannot fully meet user demands. For example, the average transaction rate of Bitcoin is seven transactions per second (tps), while that of Ethereum is 15 tps, which is much lower than the average transaction rate of Visa (1700 tps) [4]. The performance of a blockchain system is mainly affected by the broadcast delay of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network and the network bandwidth [5; 6]. In a blockchain system, transactions and blocks must be broadcast to all nodes in the network, which requires a certain amount of time to ensure that all nodes have received the transaction or block. Otherwise, network forks may occur, leading to system failure [7]. In the Bitcoin system, the system needs to maintain a block interval of 10 min to ensure that the fork probability is less than 10% [4; 6]. At the same time, the process of broadcasting transactions and blocks among P2P nodes through a flooding protocol results in a large amount of redundant data transmissions, causing bandwidth waste and easily leading to network congestion. Lengthy broadcast delays and network congestion significantly increase the block interval, thereby reducing the performance of the blockchain system. Therefore, in order to improve the performance of a blockchain system, it is necessary to reduce the broadcast delay and bandwidth consumption in a blockchain network. Current research on blockchain network communication mechanisms primarily focuses on optimizing the network topology and broadcast protocols in P2P-based networks. For instance, Kadcast [8] employs the structured network topology of Kademlia [9] to implement hierarchical broadcasting, effectively reducing redundant messages and improving propagation efficiency. Additionally, relay networks such as Falcon [10] and FIBRE [11] have been deployed in blockchain systems to accelerate block and transaction dissemination. The high-performance blockchain platform Solana [12] adopts the Turbine block propagation protocol, which fragments blocks into smaller data packets and disseminates them in a tree-structured manner. This approach alleviates network bandwidth pressure, enhances propagation speed, and improves system scalability. However, these studies remain constrained by the end-to-end transmission design principles of TCP/IP networks. In large-scale blockchain content distribution scenarios, point-to-point unicast transmission leads to network congestion and bandwidth inefficiency [13; 14]. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) [15] is an emerging network architecture that decouples content identifiers from locators by prioritizing information-centric communication. Features such as name-based addressing and routing, in-network caching, and multicast support [14; 15] enable ICN nodes to participate in content caching and distribution, thereby enhancing content dissemination efficiency. This provides new opportunities for optimizing blockchain network communication. Existing research on ICN-based blockchain communication [13; 14; 16] has primarily focused on the implementation and compatibility of blockchain communication protocols within ICN/NDN networks. However, research on blockchain network communication mechanisms in hybrid IP/ICN environments remains limited. Consequently, existing blockchain P2P networks have yet to fully exploit ICN's advantages to improve communication efficiency. To address this gap, this paper proposes BLOCK-ICN, an ICN-based blockchain network communication architecture compatible with IP networks. BLOCK-ICN enables the deployment of blockchain applications on ICN nodes equipped with computing and storage capabilities.