Performance Evaluation of Blockchain Based Agricultural Input Voucher System
Isakwisa Gaddy Tende, Kentaro Aburada, Hisaaki Yamaba, Tetsuro Katayama, Naonobu Okazaki · 2021 IEEE 10th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics (GCCE) · 2021
Large portion of rural small-scale farmers in Tanzania can’t afford to buy quality agricultural inputs (fertilizers and seeds), therefore the government of Tanzania provides these farmers with paper-based subsidy vouchers which allow them to buy the agricultural inputs at only half price. However, challenges like misuse of the vouchers by some government officials (stealing and favoritism in vouchers’ allocation) and lack of trust (difficulty of verifying vouchers’ authenticity) have resulted into low crop productivity for the farmers and loss of government funds. In our previous work, we developed agricultural input voucher system which stores and allocates digital subsidy vouchers to farmers in the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network and we evaluated its performance based on transaction throughput and latency metrics which are important to farmers, who access the system through Short Message Service (SMS) in their mobile phones. The blockchain network’s features such as hashing and digital signature prevent misuse and ensure trust of the digital vouchers. In this paper, we evaluate performance of the developed blockchain network based on resources (CPU and memory) consumption metrics which are important in planning resources during system deployment. The evaluation findings reveal that, Raft consensus protocol consumes resources more efficiently than Kafka consensus protocol.