ACRS-Raft: A Raft Consensus Protocol for Adaptive Data Maintenance in the Metaverse Based on Cauchy Reed–Solomon Codes

Consumer electronics technology significantly shapes the landscape of virtual worlds, with devices like virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses, smartphones, and haptic feedback devices providing users with immersive experiences. However, the rapid evolution of the metaverse raises concerns about privacy and security as digitization expands into every aspect of the real world, resulting in a substantial increase in data volume. To address these concerns, blockchain technology emerges as a potential solution due to its decentralized nature and tamper-proof capabilities. Blockchain can play a vital role in safeguarding personal information and virtual identities within the metaverse. Nevertheless, existing consensus protocols in large systems may incur high network and storage costs. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Raft consensus protocol for adaptive data maintenance in the metaverse based on Cauchy Reed-Solomon (CRS) codes. This protocol reduces the data storage requirements of nodes by leveraging erasure code techniques and optimizes blockchain processing capacity by adding coded data blocks to functioning servers. To demonstrate the advantages of the scheme, we construct a key-value pair based on ACRS-Raft and evaluate it. The experimental results demonstrate that ACRS-Raft saves about 70% of storage space and improves write throughput by 260% over the Raft protocol.