Pooling Approach for Task Allocation in the Blockchain Based Decentralized Storage Network

Abstract

Blockchain technology has provided a solid system to develop incentivization algorithms using the smart contract. Blockchain applies the distributed ledger to store transaction histories, and the information is stored across a network of computers instead of on a single server. This facilitates the development of a new set of applications such as distributed file storage systems where users can rent out their storage in return for a premium. The distributed file storage systems provide more privacy and security compared to the centralized storage models as there is no need to have a trusted party. New schemes have been developed for distributed file storage systems on top of the blockchain platform, however, the problem of task/service allocation in these models have not been studied before. In this paper, we study the task/service allocation in the distributed file storage systems considering the challenge of computation cost. First, we formalize the problem of task/service allocation in a decentralized storage network, and then we discuss different approaches to allocate storage tasks to storage servers in an efficient manner. Moreover, we study the benefits of the cooperation (a.k.a pooling) in the storage and retrieval markets of distributed storage networks. The evaluation results show the benefit of our proposed pooling based approach in storage and retrieval markets.