A Dual Framework for Optimized Data Storage and Retrieval using Lightweight Python Blockchain and Scalable Smart Contracts with IPFS

TL;DR

This paper presents a lightweight Python blockchain framework integrated with IPFS for efficient, secure, and scalable IoT data storage and retrieval, significantly reducing upload times compared to existing solutions.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel dual framework combining a lightweight Python blockchain with IPFS, achieving faster data upload and retrieval for IoT applications compared to traditional methods.

Findings

Achieved 93.47% faster data upload time (7.63 sec vs. 117.12 sec)

Further optimized upload time to 4.2 sec with the new framework

Outperformed existing IPFS-smart contract solutions in efficiency and security

Abstract

The exponential growth of IoT data demands efficient, secure, and scalable storage solutions on one hand, and efficient data migration and retrieval on the other hand are essential for the systems to be practical and acceptable for different applications. The traditional cloud-based models face latency, security, and high operational costs, while existing bi-directional data storage and retrieval-based IPFS models are not computationally efficient and incur high gas costs at the cost of a necessary blockchain deployment. To overcome the challenges of efficient data migration, we initially developed a 2-way data storage and retrieval system as well as a scalable framework that dynamically monitors and transfers device-generated data to IPFS, records the content identifier(CID) on a blockchain, and enables secure, real-time access via smart contracts. Experimental results demonstrate that the existing work achieved an average data upload time of 117.12 sec for a file size of 500 MB; our framework achieves a faster upload time of 7.63 sec, marking a 93.47% improvement. We further optimize the proposed framework to reduce the file upload time incurred from the smart contracts by introducing a blockchain-inspired, lightweight, and customizable Python framework that replicates the storage and retrieval functionalities of a traditional blockchain, where the file upload time is 4.2 sec, further optimized by 45% from our previous approach, thus demonstrating its efficiency, security and suitability for deploy ment in real-time and critical IoT applications and outperforming the existing IPFS-smart contract based solutions.