TimeChain: A Secure and Decentralized Off-chain Storage System for IoT Time Series Data

Blockchain-based distributed storage systems offer enhanced security, transparency, and lower costs compared to traditional centralized storage, making them ideal for peer-to-peer collaboration. However, with the trend towards the Web of Things (WoT), lower transaction speeds and higher computational requirements limit their access to high-density data such as IoT. To address this, we propose TimeChain, an efficient off-chain blockchain storage system for IoT time series data. TimeChain batches discrete time series data, storing only the hash value of each batch on-chain while keeping the complete data off-chain. This significantly reduces storage overhead on the blockchain and storage latency by 37.4 times. TimeChain adopts an adaptive packaging mechanism to reduce the additional latency in range queries by converting the batch processing problem into a graph partitioning problem. To reduce the overhead of node selection, TimeChain integrates a node selection mechanism based on consensus protocol, combining node selection and consensus processes together. TimeChain also proposes a Locality-Sensitive Hashing tree-based data integrity verification mechanism to reduce transmission size. Our evaluation shows a reduction in query latency by 64.6% and storage latency by 35.3% compared to existing systems.