ESM2-Tree: An maintenance efficient authentication data structure in blockchain

Blockchain technology is gaining broader attention. Owing to its immutability property and byzantine fault-tolerance consensus protocol, blockchain offers a brand new trusted data-sharing solution. Some researchers use blockchain to drive autonomous collaboration among smart devices, which face massive spatial data updates and usage. The key challenge lies in designing an authenticated data structure (ADS) that can efficiently process spatial data and queries. However, the previous schemes could not handle spatial data efficiently or did not consider the efficiency of frequent data updates. In this paper, we take a step toward implementing a maintenance-efficient ADS on the blockchain, called ESM2-Tree, which is not only good at processing spatial data but also effective in supporting authenticated spatial queries by partitioning and merging data at different granularities. Theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation validate the performance of our ADS, which reduces the overall data structure maintenance overhead by about 50% in a uniform data distribution scenario.