Storage reduction of hyperledger fabric with fault tolerance control on shard channels

Abstract

Blockchain has gained popularity in software industry for its transparency, security and privacy guarantees. However, it has scalability issues in terms of latency and throughput which is addressed by literature to some extent with better consensus and communication protocols. But the inherent problem of high storage requirement for append only blocks and high computing needs are also the barriers to large scale adoption of blockchain in networks with low end devices. This issue has currently drawn attention for advances in Blockchain. In this work, we propose a sharding configuration for popular Hyperledger Fabric(HLF) blockchain and show the storage reduction with an alternative way of reducing fault tolerance. With our novel approach we show the storage reduction in overall network with certain social community formation characteristics in node interaction. Here we present numeric results on how much storage can be saved for trading off fault tolerance (FT) of HLF in sharded architecture in conjunction with utilizing the network community detection. We present the storage reduction in three datasets and discuss the channel based shard characteristics in terms of different parameters. Overall, our work paves way for running HLF on a small scale, reducing cost of running and adding compatibility in various use cases demonstrating idea of partial ledger based participation. We compare this result with state-of-the-art. We analysed the impact of shard size, transaction size and transaction per block (TPB) on storage consumption and latency. This serve as a guide for practical usage where in addition to reduction of storage cost in overall network, the storage and computation cost in nodes (e.g. IOT and Mobile Node) can also be kept at desired level.