A low-storage synchronization framework for blockchain systems

Abstract

The advent of blockchain technology has brought major changes to traditional centralized storage. Therefore, various fields have begun to study the application and development of blockchain. However, blockchain technology has a serious shortcoming of data bloating. The reason is that blockchain technology achieves decentralization by storing complete blockchain data at each node, incurring a significant amount of blockchain data. Therefore, each node must spend significant amount of storage space and initialization synchronization time. To solve the above problems, in this research, we propose a secure and agile synchronization framework for low storage blockchains. First, we design a K-extreme segment algorithm, which reduces the synchronization time by returning only the first and last $k$ blocks of each block segment at once to the local storage. Next, we decentrally store the block data of the blockchain by IPFS and establish a backup mechanism by IPFS-cluster. Finally, due to use of distributed storage, the nodes must request un-stored block data from IPFS, causing an increase in the throughput of the blockchain network. To avoid network congestion, we propose the working set algorithm to improve the hit ratio of the local storage and reduce the number of requests to decrease throughput. In summary, our experiments demonstrate that the ratio of full nodes to low storage nodes is significantly lower for nodes with higher storage limits compared to those with lower storage limits. In other words, a higher storage limit results in more low storage nodes which can be permitted to ensure that the blockchain network is robust and reliable. Therefore, our proposed framework can provide reliable low storage nodes for the blockchain. The node can reduce the local storage pressure and can still maintain the full functionality of blockchains.