Application of Blockchain Sharding Technology in Chinese Medicine Traceability System

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is one of the most promising programs for disease prevention and treatment. Meanwhile, the quality of TCM has garnered much attention. To ensure the quality of TCM, many works are based on the blockchain scheme to design the traceability scheme of TCM to trace its origin. Although these schemes can ensure the integrity, sharability, credibility, and immutability of TCM more effectively, many problems are exposed with the rapid growth of TCM data in blockchains, such as expensive overhead, performance bottlenecks, and the traditional blockchain architecture is unsuitable for TCM data with dynamic growth. Motivated by the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel and lightweight TCM traceability architecture based on the blockchain using sharding (LBS-TCM). Compared to the existing blockchain-based TCM traceability system, our architecture utilizes sharding to develop a novel traceability mechanism that supports more convenient traceability operations for TCM requirements such as uploading, querying, and downloading. Specifically, our architecture consists of a leader shard blockchain layer as its main component, which employs a sharding mechanism to conveniently TCM tracing. Empirical evaluations demonstrated that our architecture showed better performance in many aspects compared to traditional blockchain architectures, such as TCM transaction processing, TCM transaction querying, TCM uploading, etc. In our architecture, tracing TCM has become a very efficient operation, which ensures the quality of TCM and provides great convenience for subsequent TCM analysis and retrospective research.