Performance Evaluation of Consensus Protocols in Blockchain-based Audit Systems

Abstract

Blockchain-based audit systems use “Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance” (PBFT) consensus protocol which suffers from a high message complexity and low scalability. Alternatives to PBFT have not been tested in blockchain-based audit systems since no blockchain testbed supports the execution and benchmarking of different consensus protocols in a unified testing environment. In this paper, we address this gap by developing a blockchain testbed capable of executing and testing five consensus protocols in a blockchain network; namely PBFT, Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Proof-of-Elapsed Time (PoET), and Clique. We carry out performance evaluation of those consensus algorithms using data from a real-world audit system. Our results show that the Clique protocol is best suited for blockchain-based audit systems, based on scalability features.