Analyzing the Performance of the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol

Abstract

With the increasing demand for communication between blockchains, improving the performance of cross-chain communication protocols becomes an emerging challenge. We take a first step towards analyzing the limitations of cross-chain communication protocols by comprehensively evaluating Cosmos Network's Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol. To achieve our goal we introduce a novel framework to guide empirical evaluations of cross-chain communication protocols. We implement an instance of our framework as a tool to evaluate the IBC protocol. Our findings highlight several challenges, such as high transaction confirmation latency, bottlenecks in the blockchain's RPC implementation and concurrency issues that hinder the scalability of the cross-chain message relayer. We also demonstrate how to reduce the time required to complete cross-chain transfers by up to 70% when submitting large amounts of transfers. Finally, we discuss challenges faced during deployment with the objective of contributing to the development and advancement of cross-chain communication.