A Block Storage Optimization Method for Blockchain-Enabled Industrial Internet of Things

With the rapid development of 5G, numerous data is generated in the blockchain-enabled industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Although these peers in the blockchain system have the storage ability, they are far from meeting the storage requirements of the generated data. In addition, all data is stored in the blockchain network, which is unfriendly to applications that require real-time information. To address the above storage problems, this article proposes a block storage optimization method for blockchain-enabled IIoT, whose core idea is to conditionally select some blocks to store in the cloud. This method firstly models the selection conditions of blocks as a many-objective optimization problem, where the selection conditions include using probability, storage cost, space occupation, and transmission cost. Then, a cascading selection-based evolutionary algorithm (CSEA) for many-objective optimization is developed to solve the model and thereby obtain the optimal blocks stored in the cloud, where CSEA adopts the diversity-first principle. Finally, CSEA is first compared with seven state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark test suites for validating its ability to obtain reliable experimental results, and then is used to solve the proposed model. The corresponding results demonstrate that CSEA has high competitiveness, and our method can effectively address the storage problems above. In summary, this article provides a novel method for addressing the storage problem in the blockchain-enabled IIoT.