Document Type
Dissertation
Disciplines
1.2 COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, Computer Sciences
Abstract
Blockchain offers a potential solution to some of the security challenges faced by the internet-of-things (IoT) by using its practically immutable ledger to store data transactions. However, past applications of blockchain in IoT encountered limitations in the rate at which transactions were committed to the chain as new blocks. These limitations were often the result of the time-consuming and computationally expensive consensus mechanisms found in public blockchains. Hyperledger Sawtooth is an open-source private blockchain platform that offers an efficient proof-of-elapsed-time (PoET) consensus mechanism. Sawtooth has performed well in benchmarks against other blockchains. However, a performance evaluation for a practical application of Sawtooth for IoT data security using real data was found to be lacking in the literature. To address this gap, an experiment was designed to evaluate the performance of an edge computing implementation of Sawtooth to store temperature data from a physical IoT device. Experiments were then performed for a range of input transaction rates to evaluate performance under different workloads. The results of the experiments indicate that Sawtooth can store transactions at a rate of at least 10 transactions per second in the edge computing implementation that was evaluated. The implementation was highly reliable in terms of transactions submitted versus transactions committed. The experiment also demonstrates that blockchain applications for IoT data security can be extended to any environment that has access to relatively low specification hardware and Wi-Fi internet connectivity. Some limitations were encountered during the experiments, particularly in relation to the amount of variance in the rate at which transactions were committed to the blockchain. This could have implications for some use cases at the business solution layer that depend on stable and consistent performance.
Recommended Citation
Connolly, S. (2022). Performance evaluation of an edge computing implementation of Hyperledger Sawtooth for IoT data security. [Technological University Dublin].
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Publication Details
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Technological University Dublin for the degree of M.Sc. in Computer Science (Advanced Software Development) 16 June 2022.