Performance Evaluation of Consensus Algorithms in Private Blockchain Networks

Abstract

Blockchain, one of the modern technologies, has received significant attention recently. The blockchain is an immutable ledger which records the transaction in a decentralized manner that ensures high security. Blockchain-based applications are popular in numerous fields like financial services, cryptocurrencies, cybersecurity, supply chain, health care, E-Governance, asset management, Internet of Things (IoT), and so on. In order to validate a transaction within a ledger, blockchain uses the concept of consensus. Consensus guarantees fault tolerance, reliability and high security of the blockchain systems. The most widely used consensus algorithms in the modern blockchains are the Proof of Work (PoW), the Proof of Stake (PoS), the Proof of Activity(PoA) and the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance(PBFT). In this work, we conduct a performance evaluation of these four consensus algorithms using Naive implementation of a blockchain network. We also conduct experiments with two popular consensus mechanisms in Ethereum platform. We study the characteristics of transaction and query latencies by varying the number of complexity and transactions. Finally, we present the conclusion on the performance consensus algorithms.