Space-efficient logging for Supply Chain Traceability based on blockchain

Abstract

Supply chain traceability has become a prime requirement for industries to ensure product quality. Existing solutions often rely on trusted third parties to track the provenance and journey of products in a centralized manner. Blockchain provides a decentralized solution that can achieve immutability and auditability for digital records of supply chain transactions without the need of third parties. However, existing blockchain-based methods do not carefully consider the tracing process, which often needs to retrieve transaction logs related to the target product from a large number of irrelevant logs, resulting in unsatisfactory space overhead and slow query time. Moreover, current smart contracts often ignore the time spent on Ethereum calls, which consume a lot of time when fetching logs. In this paper, we propose a space-saving blockchain-based mechanism to efficiently explore the transaction logs for supply chain traceability. The mechanism introduces a new filter to identify relevant logs fast while using little space, and we propose a new token that extends the data structure in existing smart contracts, reducing the number of Ethereum calls. The experimental results show that our scheme achieves 49% improvement on space consumption and 400ms speed-up in time consumption compared with the state-of-art methods.