In this paper, we introduce SwarMED, a decentralized yet high throughput interoperability system for big biomedical data. SwarMED uses Etehreum blockchain for trustless security and Swarm p2p storage to handle high throughput transaction of big data. In SwarMED, we developed an indexing mechanism over the immutable storage of Swarm to achieve high-throughput while sharing millions of patient records and images among multiple parties.
SwarMED achieved a high throughput of 250K medical records per second over a private network constructed over LSU-HPC cluster. This high throughput is 9x more comparing to conventional way of using p2p storage in conjunction with blockchain. This high throughput enables the patients to get realtime access to his comprehensive medical history and scientists to gain real-time access to different medical data for collaborative research complying to the constraints posed by existing laws.
Our system-level analysis over different design alternatives over different transfer and storage architectures shows that, p2p storage platforms automatically provide significantly better scalability over traditional HTTP with increasing number of clients. Swarm provides 2x more I/O throughput and 10x less latency than IPFS, another p2p storage system making it a better choice for decentralized big data transaction.