Open Access

ARTICLE

A Storage Optimization Scheme for Blockchain Transaction Databases

Jingyu Zhang^1,2, Siqi Zhong¹, Jin Wang^1,3, Xiaofeng Yu^4,*, Osama Alfarraj⁵

1 School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, China
2 School of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410000, China
3 School of Information Science and Engineering, Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou, 350000, China
4 School of Business, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China
5 Computer Science Department, Community College, King Saud University, Riyadh, 11437, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Xiaofeng Yu. Email:

Computer Systems Science and Engineering 2021, 36(3), 521-535. https://doi.org/10.32604/csse.2021.014530

Received 26 September 2020; Accepted 10 November 2020; Issue published 18 January 2021

Abstract

As the typical peer-to-peer distributed networks, blockchain systems require each node to copy a complete transaction database, so as to ensure new transactions can by verified independently. In a blockchain system (e.g., bitcoin system), the node does not rely on any central organization, and every node keeps an entire copy of the transaction database. However, this feature determines that the size of blockchain transaction database is growing rapidly. Therefore, with the continuous system operations, the node memory also needs to be expanded to support the system running. Especially in the big data era, the increasing network traffic will lead to faster transaction growth rate. This paper analyzes blockchain transaction databases and proposes a storage optimization scheme. The proposed scheme divides blockchain transaction database into cold zone and hot zone using expiration recognition method based on Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm. It can achieve storage optimization by moving unspent transaction outputs outside the in-memory transaction databases. We present the theoretical analysis on the optimization method to validate the effectiveness. Extensive experiments show our proposed method outperforms the current mechanism for the blockchain transaction databases.

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Citations