A Novel Exploration for Blockchain in Distributed File Storage

Abstract

Distributed file storage provides reliable access to data through redundancy spread on distributed nodes. Various application scenarios emerge, such as include data centers, storage in wireless networks and peer-to-peer storage systems. Storing data by using code, such as an erasure code, calls for less redundancy compared with simple replication in terms of reliability. Nevertheless, since data fragments are periodically replaced when some nodes fail, a key acute question is how to generate encoded data fragments in a distributed way when transferring as little data as possible over the network. For a coded system, a new node to repair from a node failure is to download subsets of data from some surviving nodes, reconstructs some lost coded blocks by using the downloaded fragments, and stores them at the new node. This procedure is not optimal. In this paper, we introduce blockchain to protect distributed data in terms of node failure and etc. We show that blockchain can significantly improve the integrity and credibility in distributed file storage systems. Furthermore, we harvest theory discovery of blockchain in distributed file storage system.