Ring-Overlap: A Storage Scaling Mechanism For Consortium Blockchain

With the rapid development of blockchain applications, the data that need to be stored increases dramatically, and the blockchain is about to face the problem of storage limitations. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes a storage scaling mechanism for Hyperledger Fabric, which relieves the storage pressure by dividing the peer nodes into clusters, and each node only stores partial data instead of the whole ledger. First, all accounting nodes are divided into clusters that include several nodes respectively, and part of the whole block data is stored in a single cluster; then, the block data are stored overlappingly on some nodes in the cluster, and each block is guaranteed to have some copies in a cluster. By arranging the copies on selected nodes according to our proposed mechanism, all the blocks are overlapped in a cluster. Theoretical analysis and simulation show that the storage volume occupied by nodes is decreased significantly in blockchain applications with frequent transactions, and in the case that the number of node failures in a single cluster does not exceed the threshold, the mechanism can still guarantee data integrity. Moreover, for applications with frequent transactions, storage space consumption can be significantly reduced without increasing excessive query time overhead.