Blockchain in IoT Systems: End-to-End Delay Evaluation

Providing security and privacy for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications while ensuring a minimum level of performance requirements is an open research challenge. Recently, blockchain offers a promising solution to overcome the current peer-to-peer networks limitations. In the context of IoT, Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT)-based consensus protocols are used due to the energy efficiency advantage over other consensus protocols. The consensus process in BFT is done by electing a group of authenticated nodes. The elected nodes will be responsible for ensuring the data blocks’ integrity through defining a total order on the blocks and preventing the concurrently appended blocks from containing conflicting data. However, the blockchain consensus layer contributes the most performance overhead. Therefore, a performance study needs to be conducted especially for the IoT applications that are subject to maximum delay constraints. In this paper, we obtain a mathematical expression to calculate the end-to-end delay with different network configurations, i.e., number of network hops and replica machines. We validate the proposed analytical model with simulation. Our results show that the unique characteristics of IoT traffic have an undeniable impact on the end-to-end delay requirement.