Evaluation of Ethereum End-to-end Transaction Latency

Abstract

Ethereum is a promising but revolutionary blockchain approach to support rich computational services enabled by Turing-complete instructions, also known as smart contract. Using smart contract as "back-end", any party can publish its Decentralized Applications (DApps) available to all Internet users. In other words, blockchain and smart contract enable evolving existing Internet services and applications to decentralised versions. With the developments of versatile Internet applications, the QoS requirements can be very different. For example, new-age applications such as AR/VR can be quite sensitive to even millisecond delays. End-to-end transaction latency in blockchain is a critical factor that affects the performance of DApps. It is the time duration from sending out a transaction (from the client) to having the transaction recorded on the chain. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the end-to-end latency in Ethereum and discuss the factors that may affect latency on the Ethereum main-net. It has a particular focus on the gas price because it is a key parameter controlled by users. The experiment results demonstrate some counter intuitive finding, e.g. increasing gas price does not reduce the Ethereum end-to-end latency significantly for a certain range of gas prices.