Lightweight Blockchain Processing. Case Study: Scanned Document Tracking on Tezos Blockchain

Abstract

To bridge the current gap between the Blockchain expectancies and their intensive computation constraints, the present paper advances a lightweight processing solution, based on a load-balancing architecture, compatible with the lightweight/embedding processing paradigms. In this way, the execution of complex operations is securely delegated to an off-chain general-purpose computing machine while the intimate Blockchain operations are kept on-chain. The illustrations correspond to an on-chain Tezos configuration and to a multiprocessor ARM embedded platform (integrated into a Raspberry Pi). The performances are assessed in terms of security, execution time, and CPU consumption when achieving a visual document fingerprint task. It is thus demonstrated that the advanced solution makes it possible for a computing intensive application to be deployed under severely constrained computation and memory resources, as set by a Raspberry Pi 3. The experimental results show that up to nine Tezos nodes can be deployed on a single Raspberry Pi 3 and that the limitation is not derived from the memory but from the computation resources. The execution time with a limited number of fingerprints is 40% higher than using a classical PC solution (value computed with 95% relative error lower than 5%).