BCmaster: A Compatible Framework for Comprehensively Analyzing and Monitoring Blockchain Systems in IoT

Abstract

With the ever-increasing applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), e.g., smart homes, smart cities, smart factories, etc., data security and device trustworthiness become the major concerns. Although blockchain contributes to achieve the data traceability and fault tolerance, the huge resource consumption and limited performance severely restrict its deployments in IoT. Moreover, the unique features of IoT, such as mobility, resource constraints, and security vulnerabilities, create even greater difficulties for blockchain running. Observing the lack of blockchain analyzing tools for IoT, we intend to provide a fair means with standard metrics for better understanding IoT-oriented blockchain. In this article, we present BCmaster, a blockchain analyzing and monitoring framework focusing on IoT scenarios. Based on the detailed modeling of blockchain-assisted IoT, we propose a novel metric set named 5-D quantitative metric framework, which can conduct the comprehensive blockchain analysis from five dimensions. Moreover, we design a modular architecture for BCmaster, wherein the interaction requests (IRs)-based data parser ensures a high system compatibility and the synchronous metric visualizer facilitates the real-time blockchain monitoring in IoT. Extensive evaluations in a real IoT environment demonstrate the validity of BCmaster and explore the performance of four IoT-oriented blockchain systems. Last but not least, we discuss the ways to customize IoT-oriented blockchain with the help of BCmaster.