Ensuring Data Freshness for Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain-enabled Monitoring Networks

Age of Information (AoI) is a recently proposed metric for quantifying data freshness in real-time status monitoring systems where timeliness is of importance. In this paper, we explore the data freshness in Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain-enabled monitoring networks (HeMN) by leveraging the AoI metric. In HeMN, status updates from sources are transmitted and recorded in the Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) network. To investigate the statistical characteristics of the AoI in HeMN, we first model the transmission latency and the consensus latency. We then analyze the AoI-related performance of HeMN including the average AoI, the AoI violation probability, and the peak age of information (PAoI) violation probability in closed forms. Especially, for the AoI violation probability, we also provide a simplified form for a special case, which also can be an upper or lower bound of the actual AoI violation probability. We also investigate the effects of the HeMN parameters (i.e., target successful transmission probability (STP), block size, and timeout) on the AoI-related performance, and show each of them gives conflicting effects on the AoI, which leads to the design insights for keeping data fresh in HeMN.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2010.1478