Experimental Performance Analysis of a Scalable Distributed Hyperledger Fabric for a Large-Scale IoT Testbed

Blockchain technology, with its decentralization characteristics, immutability, and traceability, is well-suited for facilitating secure storage, sharing, and management of data in decentralized Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Despite the increasing development of blockchain platforms, there is still no comprehensive approach for adopting blockchain technology in IoT systems. This is due to the blockchain’s limited capability to process substantial transaction requests from a massive number of IoT devices. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a popular open-source permissioned blockchain platform hosted by the Linux Foundation. This article reports a comprehensive empirical study that measures HLF’s performance and identifies potential performance bottlenecks to better meet the requirements of blockchain-based IoT applications. The study considers the implementation of HLF on distributed large-scale IoT systems. First, a model for monitoring the performance of the HLF platform is presented. It addresses the overhead challenges while delivering more details on system performance and better scalability. Then, the proposed framework is implemented to evaluate the impact of varying network workloads on the performance of the blockchain platform in a large-scale distributed environment. In particular, the performance of the HLF is evaluated in terms of throughput, latency, network size, scalability, and the number of peers serviceable by the platform. The obtained experimental results indicate that the proposed framework can provide detailed real-time performance evaluation of blockchain systems for large-scale IoT applications.