Benchmarks and Models for Blockchain
Aad van Moorsel · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2019
In this presentation we consider blockchain from a performance engineering perspective, with an emphasis on consensus algorithms. A set of examples of performance characteristics and challenges of public blockchains serves as introduction to the presentation. These examples motivate a list of main topics that require further analysis by the research community, in both public and private blockchain variants. This list considers performance engineering challenges across the different layers of blockchain systems, which we identify as system, connector, and incentives layers, respectively. We go in some more depth regarding the evaluation of consensus algorithms, such as Proof of Work, which are a core element of the connector layer. In the presentation we will advocate probabilistic verification as a key approach to evaluate different consensus algorithms with respect to practically meaningful metrics. Throughout the talk, we present snippets of our recent research results in the area of modelling and benchmarking blockchain systems [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].