Optimizing Read Performance in Lightweight Blockchain with Cooperative Storage Scheme.

As a popular and innovative technology in fields including digital currencies and the Internet of Things, blockchain provides decentralized and immutable trust to multiple parties through an append-only chained structure and redundant replicas. However, the increasing length of the blockchain leads to extreme storage costs. While some lightweight storage schemes compress block data on-chain, most of them suffer from poor generality, limited compression capabilities, and imperfect read performance. To alleviate these issues, we propose a cooperative storage scheme as a lightweight solution for resource-limited blockchains. It incorporates a history-based node assignment mechanism and a timeline-based adaptive read mechanism to reduce the decoding probability when accessing transactions. The former maps chunks of erasure codes to nodes based on their history scores, while the latter redundantly caches blocks at certain nodes for easy access. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme actively mitigates the influence of anomalous nodes on read requests. In contrast to typical schemes, it achieves extremely low read time with less storage cost, which is especially valuable in the long term.