A Federated Blockchain Architecture for File Storage with Improved Latency and Reliability in IoT DApp Services

Abstract

Blockchain technology can address data falsification, single point of failure (SPOF), and DDoS attacks on centralized services. By utilizing IoT devices as blockchain nodes, it is possible to solve the problem that it is difficult to ensure the integrity of data generated by using current IoT devices. However, as the amount of data generated by IoT devices increases, scalability issues are inevitable. As a result, large amounts of data are managed on external cloud storage or distributed file storage. However, this has the disadvantage of being outside the blockchain network. This makes it difficult to ensure reliability and causes high latency during data download and upload. To address these limitations, we propose a method for managing large amounts of data in the local storage node of a blockchain network with improved latency and reliability. Each blockchain network node stores data, which is synchronized and recovered based on reaching a consensus between smart contracts in a cluster network. The cluster network consists of a service leader node that serves as a gateway for services and a cluster node that stores service data in storage. The blockchain network stores synchronization and recovery metadata created in the cluster network. In addition, we showed that the performance of smart contract execution, network transmission, and metadata generation, which are elements of the proposed consensus process, is not significantly affected. In addition, we built a service leader node and a cluster node by implementing the proposed structure. We compared the performance (latency) of IoT devices when they utilized the proposed architecture and existing external distributed storage. Our results show improvements up to 4 and 10 times reduction in data upload (store) and download latency, respectively.