6,385 research outputs found
How Much Communication Resource is Needed to Run a Wireless Blockchain Network?
Blockchain is built on a peer-to-peer network that relies on frequent
communications among the distributively located nodes. In particular, the
consensus mechanisms (CMs), which play a pivotal role in blockchain, are
communication resource-demanding and largely determines blockchain security
bound and other key performance metrics such as transaction throughput, latency
and scalability. Most blockchain systems are designed in a stable wired
communication network running in advanced devices under the assumption of
sufficient communication resource provision. However, it is envisioned that the
majority of the blockchain node peers will be connected through the wireless
network in the future. Constrained by the highly dynamic wireless channel and
scarce frequency spectrum, communication can significantly affect blockchain's
key performance metrics. Hence, in this paper, we present wireless blockchain
networks (WBN) under various commonly used CMs and we answer the question of
how much communication resource is needed to run such a network. We first
present the role of communication in the four stages of the blockchain
procedure. We then discuss the relationship between the communication resource
provision and the WBNs performance, for three of the most used blockchain CMs
namely, Proof-of-Work (PoW), practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) and
Raft. Finally, we provide analytical and simulated results to show the impact
of the communication resource provision on blockchain performance
A Hierarchical and Location-aware Consensus Protocol for IoT-Blockchain Applications
Blockchain-based IoT systems can manage IoT devices and achieve a high level
of data integrity, security, and provenance. However, incorporating existing
consensus protocols in many IoT systems limits scalability and leads to high
computational cost and consensus latency. In addition, location-centric
characteristics of many IoT applications paired with limited storage and
computing power of IoT devices bring about more limitations, primarily due to
the location-agnostic designs in blockchains. We propose a hierarchical and
location-aware consensus protocol (LH-Raft) for IoT-blockchain applications
inspired by the original Raft protocol to address these limitations. The
proposed LH-Raft protocol forms local consensus candidate groups based on
nodes' reputation and distance to elect the leaders in each sub-layer
blockchain. It utilizes a threshold signature scheme to reach global consensus
and the local and global log replication to maintain consistency for blockchain
transactions. To evaluate the performance of LH-Raft, we first conduct an
extensive numerical analysis based on the proposed reputation mechanism and the
candidate group formation model. We then compare the performance of LH-Raft
against the classical Raft protocol from both theoretical and experimental
perspectives. We evaluate the proposed threshold signature scheme using
Hyperledger Ursa cryptography library to measure various consensus nodes'
signing and verification time. Experimental results show that the proposed
LH-Raft protocol is scalable for large IoT applications and significantly
reduces the communication cost, consensus latency, and agreement time for
consensus processing.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (
Volume: 19, Issue: 3, September 2022). arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:2305.1696
How blockchain impacts cloud-based system performance: a case study for a groupware communication application
This paper examines the performance trade-off when implementing a blockchain architecture for a cloud-based groupware communication application. We measure the additional cloud-based resources and performance costs of the overhead required to implement a groupware collaboration system over a blockchain architecture. To evaluate our groupware application, we develop measuring instruments for testing scalability and performance of computer systems deployed as cloud computing applications. While some details of our groupware collaboration application have been published in earlier work, in this paper we reflect on a generalized measuring method for blockchain-enabled applications which may in turn lead to a general methodology for testing cloud-based system performance and scalability using blockchain. Response time and transaction throughput metrics are collected for the blockchain implementation against the non-blockchain implementation and some conclusions are drawn about the additional resources that a blockchain architecture for a groupware collaboration application impose
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