A Storage Efficient Blockchain Model for Constrained Applications
Yuvaraj Rajendra, Sachin Sahu, Venkatesan Subramanian, Sandeep K. Shukla · 2021
The growing chain’s storage requirements are al- ways an issue with blockchain platforms, and devices may not allocate the required storage to replicate an entire blockchain instance. To overcome this issue, we propose a storage constraint-free blockchain model that divides the growing blockchain into fixed-size sets of blocks, excluding the genesis block and allowing the participating nodes to store the recent blocks according to their storage capacity. Suppose a node decides not to replicate a few sets of old blocks to accommodate the blockchain according to its storage availability. In that case, it stores the corresponding set’s last block hash and the XOR of the remaining blocks’ hashes and then drops those blocks. Nodes that receive blocks, equivalent to the deleted blocks from other nodes will validate it by comparing the previous set’s last block hash with the received set’s first block parent hash and XOR hash with the block hashes. If they match, the node will accept the equivalent set of deleted blocks; otherwise, reject. This will guarantee to avoid any uncertainty, single collision multi-block replacement, and partial chain replacement attack. The analysis and experimental results show that the proposed model is storage efficient and needs less overhead. The proposed model provides security equivalent to the traditional blockchain and allows the storage constrained devices to participate in the application for a long time compared with the other models.