Performance evaluation of permissionless distributed ledger technology ethereum

Abstract

Permissionless or public Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) provide full decentralization and transparency. The performance evaluation of permissionless Distributed Ledger Technologies is difficult due to their dynamic nature. This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of permissionless Ethereum DLT. Public test networks highly resemble the main network and capture the dynamic nature of permissionless DLTs. The paper proposes the BloodTrace application to trace the donated blood from the donor to the patient. The performance is evaluated by deploying the BloodTrace smart contract on the public test network Ropsten. The data collection for the calculation of the performance parameters can be performed in two ways: i) RPC based method ii) Log-based method. RPC based method involves polling the blockchain for each transaction data. The log-based method involves the collection of logs and fewer RPC calls to the Blockchain. The probabilistic nature of transaction confirmation is also taken into consideration while calculating the Latency (Finality) by analysing the effect of block confirmations on the latency. The evaluation results are then compared with the results obtained by the Hyperledger Caliper Benchmarking tool as it is using RPC based approach for calculation of performance parameters.