A Hybrid Blockchain-IPFS Solution for Secure and Scalable Data Collection and Storage for Smart Water Meters

TL;DR

This paper presents a hybrid blockchain-IPFS system for smart water meters that improves data storage efficiency, throughput, and scalability by offloading large data to IPFS while maintaining on-chain security.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid architecture combining blockchain and IPFS for IoT data management, demonstrating improved performance over traditional blockchain-only solutions.

Findings

IPFS integration reduces on-chain storage requirements

Hybrid system achieves higher transaction throughput

Block times are decreased with IPFS offloading

Abstract

Scalable and secure data management is important in Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as smart water meters, where traditional blockchain storage can be restrictive due to high data volumes. This paper investigates a hybrid blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) approach designed to optimise storage efficiency, enhance throughput, and reduce block time by offloading large data off-chain to IPFS while preserving on-chain integrity. A substrate-based private blockchain was developed to store smart water meter (SWM) data, and controlled experiments were conducted to evaluate blockchain performance with and without IPFS. Key metrics, including block size, block time, and transaction throughput, were analysed across varying data volumes and node counts. Results show that integrating IPFS significantly reduces on-chain storage demands, leading to smaller block sizes, increased throughput, and improved block times compared to blockchain-only storage. These findings highlight the potential of hybrid blockchain-IPFS models for efficiently and securely managing high-volume IoT data.