A blockchain-based data storage framework: A rotating multiple random masters and error-correcting approach

Abstract

A blockchain is resistant to modification based on the consensus of the network majority, which requires a large amount of communication among distributed nodes. Existing data dissemination protocol solves the wrong block problem also at a high communication cost. This paper investigates the error-correcting tamper-proofing data storage problem and proposes a three-layer framework to store the data in the blockchain to achieve data integrity. The data are stored as blocks, and we design a two-dimension chain data structure consisting of horizontal and vertical chains. This paper proposes a Rotating multiple random Masters and Error-Correcting data storage framework based on blockchain (RMEC) to strike a trade-off between system decentralization and the amount of communication. The proposed Rotating Multiple Random Sampling consensus mechanism (RMRS) randomly selects multiple temporary master nodes to handle each data access request so as to reduce the communication cost. We also propose two error-correcting mechanisms to validate and correct the wrong data blocks. Finally, we implement a prototype and conduct analyses on the system performance. The experiments demonstrate that the framework can achieve data tamper-proof and effectively reduce the communication cost.