GNN-OSS: A Capacity-Feasible Graph Learning Framework for Secure Blockchain Sharding in IIoT

Abstract

Effective scaling of blockchain-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) requires sharding that simultaneously ensures transaction locality, strict committee-size feasibility, and robustness against malicious node concentration. Existing methods often fail to balance this trilemma, risking either infeasible deployments or increased shard-takeover vulnerabilities. To address this, we propose GNN-OSS, a deployable sharding framework that decouples topology-aware preference learning from hard constraint enforcement. It first employs a trust-repulsion graph neural network to learn locality-aware preferences while discouraging low-trust nodes from collapsing into the same representation region. A Post-Hoc Capacity-Constrained Projection (PH-CCP) then maps these soft preferences into strictly feasible shard assignments. Finally, an entropy-driven Overlapping Sparse Scheme (OSS) selectively replicates boundary nodes to reduce residual cross-shard overhead without altering primary consensus membership. Evaluations demonstrate that, under the evaluated settings, GNN-OSS achieves a favorable performance–security trade-off. Against 20% malicious nodes, it substantially mitigates shard-takeover risks. Furthermore, it improves throughput by up to 33% over strictly feasible baselines and lowers the cross-shard ratio from 6.4% to 4.4% with minimal per-epoch overhead. Overall, GNN-OSS provides a practical sharding framework for open or hybrid blockchain-enabled IIoT environments.