XOR Hash in Blockchain’s Header to Mitigate Storage Constraints

Abstract

The usage of internet and technology inspires the industries to work more on IoT based applications by decentralizing the data storage to ensure data integrity. In such cases, we use blockchain however, with most IoT applications there is always a storage constraint where the IoT devices keep generating the data every few minutes resulting in infinite growth of blockchain that any simple IoT devices would not be able to handle. The idea of deleting old blocks and storing only the recent data by labeling them as expired and unexpired blocks while storing Xor of hashes of deleted set of blocks. Although it resolves some of the issues and attacks, there can be some communication overhead when a node fetches some deleted blocks from other nodes, to validate these blocks, we might need whole set of blocks depending on the set size. Hence arriving at a new idea of adding Xor hash in the block header itself, that resolves the communication overhead along with that full nodes will also be used to always maintain the ledger from the beginning. These ideas will be implemented in an effective way that can be used in real world IoT based applications or any other storage constrained applications