Characterizing Latency Performance in Private Blockchain Network

There has recently been an increasing number of blockchain applications in different realms. Among the popular blockchain technologies, Ethereum is an emerging platform featuring smart contracts with the public Ethereum associated to the Ether currency. Besides, the private Ethereum has been gaining interest due to its applicability to the Internet of Things. An Ethereum blockchain network includes distributed records that are immutable and transparent through replicating among network nodes. Ethereum manages information in blocks that are submitted to the chain as transactions. This paper aims to characterize latency performance in the private Ethereum blockchain network. Initially, we clarify two perspectives of latency according to the lifecycle of transactions (transaction-oriented and block-oriented latency). We then construct a real private blockchain network with a laptop and Raspberry Pi 3b+ for the latency measurement. We write and deploy a smart contract to read and write data to the blockchain and measure the latencies in a baseline and realistic scenario. The experiment results reveal the latencies-hop correlation, as well as the latencies’ relation in different workloads. Moreover, the blockchain network spends averagely 63.92 ms (except the mining time) to take one transaction into effect in one hop.

X. Chen, K. Nguyen and H. Sekiya, "Characterizing Latency Performance in Private Blockchain Network," In Proceedings of the Mobile Networks and Management: 10th EAI International Conference, MONAMI, Chiba, Japan, 2020, No. 10-12, vol 338. Springer, Cham.
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