Modular-Based Compression Scheme for Address Data in the Blockchain System for IoV Applications

Asan emerging distributed ledger technology, blockchain provides multi-party trust between unreliable devices to share data and resources cooperatively, which facilitates the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) applications. In the typical blockchain-enabled IoV (BIoV) scenarios, based on the data of common interest collected by various sensors, the IoV devices jointly maintain the world state in the form of address-balance pairs as the proof for transaction issuing and validation, where Ethereum-like blockchain is used as the finite-state machine driven by the transactions. However, with the extension of the IoV network, an enormous number of accounts leads to the explosive growth of the state data, which has been the main challenge for BIoV with resource-limited devices. This paper proposes a modular-based adaptive bit-width compression (ABC) scheme to reduce the state data storage on each device by representing the address as a remainder with a shorter bit-width. Besides, a new transaction validation method is designed with the support of the XOR filter, which guarantees that the core functions of the blockchain can still be performed normally with the proposed scheme applied. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the compression ratio for the address data could be more than 80%, which dramatically improves the scalability of BIoV system. In addition, the extra privacy-preserving property is introduced with the compression scheme because the account information is unrecoverable from the remainders.