FabMAN: A Framework for Ledger Storage and Size Management for Hyperledger Fabric-Based IoT Applications

The increasing usage of the Internet of Things (IoT) across various domains has led to a significant surge in data generation and processing. This exponential growth has introduced numerous data security, privacy, integrity, and availability challenges. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology to address these challenges. Nevertheless, the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices does not align well with the excessive resource requirements of traditional blockchain systems. While state-of-the-art research has mainly concentrated on making the blockchain lightweight in terms of computational overhead, the issue of managing the append-only, immutable, and ever-growing ledger remains largely unaddressed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, termed FabMAN, to effectively manage the continuously expanding ledger in the context of Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain platform widely adopted for blockchain-based IoT applications. We introduce an adaptive algorithm to dynamically adjust its “Batch size” and “Batch timeout” to optimize its ledger growth. The adaptive algorithm ensures that the ledger growth is nearly optimal, considering the incoming transaction proposal rate. To validate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed method, we conduct comprehensive performance analyses through simulation and prototype implementation and compare the results with the same system model without the ledger management system. Our approach to managing the ever-growing ledger in Hyperledger Fabric-based IoT applications shows significant improvement.