Performance study on IOTA Chrysalis and Coordicide in the Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Due to the big advantages like immutable, decentralized data record and smart contracts (SC), distributed ledger technologies (DLT) gain strongly in importance in a wide variety of areas. With the fourth industrial revolution and the industrial internet of things (IIoT), new business models and technology fields based on data-driven approaches evolve and lead to the demand for trustworthy data and secure data exchange in a decentralized system. While a comprehensive number of possible industrial use cases exists, there is a lack of experimental studies on their applicability on IIoT devices. Available performance tests mostly focus on the performance of the DLT but not on their influence on the resources of the IIoT device. Furthermore, one very important DLT, namely IOTA, which is explicitly designed for application in IoT environments, did not receive much attention yet. This was due to two major drawbacks, namely the need for a centralized instance and the lack of SC functionality in the first IOTA version compared to other DLTs such as Hyperledger. The recently published version IOTA Coordicide improved in both. This paper presents detailed results from two industrial use cases and experiments on a private DLT network based on IOTA in IIoT, focusing on the resource demands for the IIoT devices with different network setups. The results confirm the suitability of IOTA for IIoT devices. Furthermore, an overview of the required resources of the IIoT devices with different transaction rates and networks sizes is given.