A Novel Block Storage Model for Consortium Blockchains

The storage overhead of blocks and storage load of nodes are increasing as consortium blockchains grow. The existing storage models consider either low-reliability issues or high storage overhead but not both. This work proposes a new storage model that combines group-based block storage with block splitting and unit encoding for the first time. The former is used to improve the reliability of a block, while the latter is adopted to reduce the storage overhead and increase the reliability of a block in a consortium blockchain. This work analyzes the storage overhead of blocks, storage load of nodes, and reliability of a consortium blockchain and designs a storage optimization method to reduce the storage overhead and improve the reliability of a blockchain system. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms Multi-layer Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, RapidChain, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance-Store in terms of storage overhead and reliability.