Abstract

Blockchain technology has drawn the attention of researchers across multiple industries, encompassing fields such as healthcare and manufacturing. Although blockchain's immutability, transparency, and traceability are undeniable advantages, persistent challenges limit its widespread integration. A significant problem encountered in blockchains is storage, particularly due to the growing number of blocks in the network. As the blockchain's size increases, it becomes harder for network peers to maintain pace, causing delays in transaction processing and reduced scalability. Furthermore, a larger blockchain requires more time to synchronize with new network nodes, which poses a significant challenge for new nodes who must download and verify the complete blockchain. This can create a bottleneck that restricts network scalability. Additionally, peers might encounter difficulties storing the entire blockchain, impeding their participation in network activities and transaction validation. Consequently, this situation could lead to centralization, where only peers with substantial storage capacities can engage in mining. Blockchain technology is undergoing rapid expansion, so innovative blockchain designs are needed. This article focuses on addressing the storage issue in current blockchain systems and exploring its impact on scalability. It explores current approaches for improving the storage efficiency of blockchain technology. These suggested solutions are grouped according to their methods, and their effectiveness is assessed through a comprehensive comparative analysis.

Keyword

Blockchain, Storage optimization, Network centralization, Transaction processing, Scalability.

Cite this article

Kavita SR, Shinde SK.Smart storage strategies for blockchain: a review of approaches. International Journal of Advanced Technology and Engineering Exploration. 2024;11(115):852-874. DOI:10.19101/IJATEE.2023.10102422

Refference

[1]Nakamoto S. Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008.

[2]Yuan Y, Wang FY. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies: model, techniques, and applications. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems. 2018; 48(9):1421-8.

[3]Guo H, Yu X. A survey on blockchain technology and its security. Blockchain: Research and Applications. 2022; 3(2):100067.

[4]Abou JJ, Saade RG. Blockchain applications–usage in different domains. IEEE Access. 2019; 7:45360-81.

[5]Khan SN, Loukil F, Ghedira-guegan C, Benkhelifa E, Bani-hani A. Blockchain smart contracts: applications, challenges, and future trends. Peer-to-peer Networking and Applications. 2021; 14:2901-25.

[6]Manzoor R, Sahay BS, Singh SK. Blockchain technology in supply chain management: an organizational theoretic overview and research agenda. Annals of Operations Research. 2022:1-48.

[7]Rejeb A, Treiblmaier H, Rejeb K, Zailani S. Blockchain research in healthcare: a bibliometric review and current research trends. Journal of Data, Information and Management. 2021; 3:109-24.

[8]Jafar U, Aziz MJ, Shukur Z. Blockchain for electronic voting system-review and open research challenges. Sensors. 2021; 21(17):1-22.

[9]Weerawarna R, Miah SJ, Shao X. Emerging advances of blockchain technology in finance: a content analysis. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 2023; 27(4):1495-508.

[10]Saari A, Vimpari J, Junnila S. Blockchain in real estate: recent developments and empirical applications. Land Use Policy. 2022; 121:106334.

[11]Ali MS, Vecchio M, Pincheira M, Dolui K, Antonelli F, Rehmani MH. Applications of blockchains in the internet of things: a comprehensive survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials. 2018; 21(2):1676-717.

[12]Choo KK, Ozcan S, Dehghantanha A, Parizi RM. Blockchain ecosystem—technological and management opportunities and challenges. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. 2020; 67(4):982-7.

[13]Lu Y. The blockchain: state-of-the-art and research challenges. Journal of Industrial Information Integration. 2019; 15:80-90.

[14]Uddin MA, Stranieri A, Gondal I, Balasubramanian V. A survey on the adoption of blockchain in IoT: challenges and solutions. Blockchain: Research and Applications. 2021; 2(2):100006.

[15]Habib G, Sharma S, Ibrahim S, Ahmad I, Qureshi S, Ishfaq M. Blockchain technology: benefits, challenges, applications, and integration of blockchain technology with cloud computing. Future Internet. 2022; 14(11):1-22.

[16]Mazlan AA, Daud SM, Sam SM, Abas H, Rasid SZ, Yusof MF. Scalability challenges in healthcare blockchain system-a systematic review. IEEE Access. 2020; 8:23663-73.

[17]Zhou Q, Huang H, Zheng Z, Bian J. Solutions to scalability of blockchain: a survey. IEEE Access. 2020; 8:16440-55.

[18]Xie J, Yu FR, Huang T, Xie R, Liu J, Liu Y. A survey on the scalability of blockchain systems. IEEE Network. 2019; 33(5):166-73.

[19]Khan D, Jung LT, Hashmani MA. Systematic literature review of challenges in blockchain scalability. Applied Sciences. 2021; 11(20):1-27.

[20]Kim S, Kwon Y, Cho S. A survey of scalability solutions on blockchain. In international conference on information and communication technology convergence 2018 (pp. 1204-7). IEEE.

[21]https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/. Accessed 15 May 2024.

[22]https://learn.bybit.com/blockchain/bitcoin-mempool-what-happens-to-the-unconfirmed-transactions/. Accessed 15 May 2024.

[23]https://www.statista.com/statistics/730818/average-number-of-ethereum-transactions/. Accessed 15 May 2024.

[24]Akrasi-mensah NK, Tchao ET, Sikora A, Agbemenu AS, Nunoo-mensah H, Ahmed AR, et al. An overview of technologies for improving storage efficiency in blockchain-based IIoT applications. Electronics. 2022; 11(16):1-25.

[25]Kim T, Lee S, Kwon Y, Noh J, Kim S, Cho S. SELCOM: selective compression scheme for lightweight nodes in blockchain system. IEEE Access. 2020; 8:225613-26.

[26]Yu B, Li X, Zhao H. PoW-BC: a PoW consensus protocol based on block compression. KSII Transactions on Internet & Information Systems. 2021; 15(4).

[27]Chen X, Lin S, Yu N. Bitcoin blockchain compression algorithm for blank node synchronization. In 11th international conference on wireless communications and signal processing (WCSP) 2019 (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

[28]Qi S, Lu Y, Zheng Y, Li Y, Chen X. Cpds: enabling compressed and private data sharing for industrial internet of things over blockchain. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 2020; 17(4):2376-87.

[29]Guo Z, Gao Z, Liu Q, Chakraborty C, Hua Q, Yu K, et al. RNS-based adaptive compression scheme for the block data in the blockchain for IIoT. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 2022; 18(12):9239-49.

[30]Marsalek A, Zefferer T, Fasllija E, Ziegler D. Tackling data inefficiency: compressing the bitcoin blockchain. In 18th international conference on trust, security and privacy in computing and communications/13th international conference on big data science and engineering (trustcom/bigdatase) 2019 (pp. 626-33). IEEE.

[31]Xu L, Chen L, Gao Z, Xu S, Shi W. EPBC: efficient public blockchain client for lightweight users. In proceedings of the 1st workshop on scalable and resilient infrastructures for distributed ledgers 2017 (pp. 1-6). ACM.

[32]Dorri A, Kanhere SS, Jurdak R. MOF-BC: a memory optimized and flexible blockchain for large scale networks. Future Generation Computer Systems. 2019; 92:357-73.

[33]Nadiya U, Mutijarsa K, Rizqi CY. Block summarization and compression in bitcoin blockchain. In international symposium on electronics and smart devices 2018 (pp. 1-4). IEEE.

[34]Palai A, Vora M, Shah A. Empowering light nodes in blockchains with block summarization. In 9th IFIP international conference on new technologies, mobility and security 2018 (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

[35]Shi D, Wang X, Xu M, Kou L, Cheng H. Ress: a reliable and efficient storage scheme for bitcoin blockchain based on raptor code. Chinese Journal of Electronics. 2023; 32(3):577-86.

[36]Qi X, Zhang Z, Jin C, Zhou A. A reliable storage partition for permissioned blockchain. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. 2020; 33(1):14-27.

[37]Liu Y, Wang K, Lin Y, Xu W. mathsf LightChain: a lightweight blockchain system for industrial internet of things. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 2019; 15(6):3571-81.

[38]Li C, Zhang J, Yang X, Youlong L. Lightweight blockchain consensus mechanism and storage optimization for resource-constrained IoT devices. Information Processing & Management. 2021; 58(4):102602.

[39]Chen J, Lv Z, Song H. Design of personnel big data management system based on blockchain. Future Generation Computer Systems. 2019; 101:1122-9.

[40]Mei H, Gao Z, Guo Z, Zhao M, Yang J. Storage mechanism optimization in blockchain system based on residual number system. IEEE Access. 2019; 7:114539-46.

[41]Zhao Y, Niu B, Li P, Fan X. A novel enhanced lightweight node for blockchain. In blockchain and trustworthy systems: first international conference, blocksys 2019, Guangzhou, China, 2019, Proceedings 1 2020 (pp. 137-49). Springer Singapore.

[42]Xu Z, Han S, Chen L. CUB, a consensus unit-based storage scheme for blockchain system. In 34th international conference on data engineering 2018 (pp. 173-84). IEEE.

[43]Xu Y. Section-blockchain: a storage reduced blockchain protocol, the foundation of an autotrophic decentralized storage architecture. In 23rd international conference on engineering of complex computer systems 2018 (pp. 115-25). IEEE.

[44]Li D, Dai J, Jiang R, Wang X, Xu Y. GAPG: a heuristic greedy algorithm for grouping storage scheme in blockchain. In IEEE/CIC international conference on communications in China (ICCC Workshops) 2020 (pp. 91-5). IEEE.

[45]Liu T, Wu J, Li J, Li J. Secure and balanced scheme for non-local data storage in blockchain network. In 21st international conference on high performance computing and communications; 17th international conference on smart city; 5th international conference on data science and systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS) 2019 (pp. 2424-7). IEEE.

[46]Dai X, Xiao J, Yang W, Wang C, Jin H. Jidar: a jigsaw-like data reduction approach without trust assumptions for bitcoin system. In 39th international conference on distributed computing systems 2019 (pp. 1317-26). IEEE.

[47]Wang X, Wang C, Zhou K, Cheng H. Ess: an efficient storage scheme for improving the scalability of bitcoin network. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. 2021; 19(2):1191-202.

[48]Matzutt R, Kalde B, Pennekamp J, Drichel A, Henze M, Wehrle K. Coinprune: shrinking bitcoin’s blockchain retrospectively. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. 2021; 18(3):3064-78.

[49]Heo JW, Ramachandran GS, Dorri A, Jurdak R. Blockchain storage optimisation with multi-level distributed caching. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. 2022; 19(4):3724-36.

[50]Pyoung CK, Baek SJ. Blockchain of finite-lifetime blocks with applications to edge-based IoT. IEEE Internet of Things Journal. 2019; 7(3):2102-16.

[51]Gao J, Li B, Li Z. Blockchain storage analysis and optimization of bitcoin miner node. In communications, signal processing, and systems: proceedings of the 2018 CSPS volume III: systems 7th 2020 (pp. 922-32). Springer Singapore.

[52]Chen H, Wang Y. MiniChain: a lightweight protocol to combat the UTXO growth in public blockchain. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 2020; 143:67-76.

[53]Mizrahi A, Rottenstreich O. Blockchain state sharding with space-aware representations. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. 2020; 18(2):1571-83.

[54]Cai X, Geng S, Zhang J, Wu D, Cui Z, Zhang W, et al. A sharding scheme-based many-objective optimization algorithm for enhancing security in blockchain-enabled industrial internet of things. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 2021; 17(11):7650-8.

[55]Jia D, Xin J, Wang Z, Wang G. Optimized data storage method for sharding-based blockchain. IEEE Access. 2021; 9:67890-900.

[56]Xu Y, Huang Y. Segment blockchain: a size reduced storage mechanism for blockchain. IEEE Access. 2020; 8:17434-41.

[57]Zamani M, Movahedi M, Raykova M. Rapidchain: scaling blockchain via full sharding. In proceedings of the SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security 2018 (pp. 931-48). ACM.

[58]Jia D, Xin J, Wang Z, Guo W, Wang G. ElasticChain: support very large blockchain by reducing data redundancy. In web and big data: second international joint conference, APWeb-WAIM 2018, Macau, China, 2018, Proceedings, Part II 2 2018 (pp. 440-54). Springer International Publishing.

[59]Luu L, Narayanan V, Zheng C, Baweja K, Gilbert S, Saxena P. A secure sharding protocol for open blockchains. In proceedings of the SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security 2016 (pp. 17-30). ACM.

[60]Raman RK, Varshney LR. Dynamic distributed storage for blockchains. In international symposium on information theory 2018 (pp. 2619-23). IEEE.

[61]Yin B, Li J, Wei X. EBSF: node characteristics-based block allocation plans for efficient blockchain storage. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. 2022; 19(4):4858-71.

[62]Zhou K, Wang C, Wang X, Chen S, Cheng H. A novel scheme to improve the scalability of bitcoin combining ipfs with block compression. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. 2022; 19(4):3694-705.

[63]Hassanzadeh-nazarabadi Y, Küpçü A, Özkasap Ö. LightChain: scalable DHT-based blockchain. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 2021; 32(10):2582-93.

[64]Yu B, Li X, Zhao H. Virtual block group: a scalable blockchain model with partial node storage and distributed hash table. The Computer Journal. 2020; 63(10):1524-36.

[65]Chen X, Zhang K, Liang X, Qiu W, Zhang Z, Tu D. HyperBSA: a high-performance consortium blockchain storage architecture for massive data. IEEE Access. 2020; 8:178402-13.

[66]Zheng Q, Li Y, Chen P, Dong X. An innovative IPFS-based storage model for blockchain. In IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence 2018 (pp. 704-8). IEEE.

[67]Xu C, Wang K, Li P, Guo S, Luo J, Ye B, Guo M. Making big data open in edges: a resource-efficient blockchain-based approach. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 2018; 30(4):870-82.

[68]Koshy P, Babu S, Manoj BS. Sliding window blockchain architecture for internet of things. IEEE Internet of Things Journal. 2020; 7(4):3338-48.

[69]Zhang J, Zhong S, Wang J, Yu X, Alfarraj O. A storage optimization scheme for blockchain transaction databases. Computer Systems Science & Engineering. 2021; 36(3):521-35.

[70]Liao Z, Cheng S, Zhang J, Wu W, Wang J, Sharma PK. GpDB: a graph-partition based storage strategy for DAG-blockchain in edge-cloud IIoT. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 2022.

[71]Xu M, Feng G, Ren Y, Zhang X. On cloud storage optimization of blockchain with a clustering-based genetic algorithm. IEEE Internet of Things Journal. 2020; 7(9):8547-58.

[72]Nartey C, Tchao ET, Gadze JD, Yeboah-akowuah B, Nunoo-mensah H, Welte D, et al. Blockchain-IoT peer device storage optimization using an advanced time-variant multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. 2022; 2022(1):5.

[73]Akrasi-mensah NK, Agbemenu AS, Nunoo-mensah H, Tchao ET, Ahmed AR, Keelson E, et al. Adaptive storage optimization scheme for blockchain-IIoT applications using deep reinforcement learning. IEEE Access. 2022; 11:1372-85.

[74]Zhou Y, Ren Y, Xu M, Feng G. An improved NSGA-III algorithm based on deep Q-networks for cloud storage optimization of blockchain. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 2023; 34(5):1406-19.