Evaluating the Efficiency of Blockchains in IoT with Simulations

Jari Kreku, Visa Vallivaara, Kimmo Halunen, Jani Suomalainen

2017

Abstract

As blockchain technology has gained popularity in many different application areas, there is a need to have tools for prototyping and evaluating various ways of applying blockchains. One interesting venue where this type of evaluation is very important is Internet of Things (IoT). In IoT scenarios the efficiency in energy consumption and also the timeliness of the transactions on the blockchain are important variables to consider. We present a way to apply an existing simulation tool - ABSOLUT - in evaluating blockchain implementations on embedded devices. We show the results of simulations on Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson Tk1 platforms and compare the latter to actual executions. Our tool receives a fairly small error (9% on the average) and we see it as a great way to help in deciding the parameters for different blockchain implementations.

References

  1. Ala-Peijari, O. (2014). Bitcoin The Virtual Currency: Energy Efficient Mining of Bitcoins. Master's Thesis, Aalto University.
  2. Bernstein, D. J. and Lange, T. (2012). The new SHA-3 software shootout. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2012:4.
  3. Binkert, N., Beckmann, B., and Black, G. (2011). The Gem5 simulator. ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 39:1-7.
  4. Bitcoin community (2015). Bitcoin wiki: Non-specialized hardware comparison. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Nonspecialized hardware comparison. Accessed 2016- 11-14.
  5. Bitcoin community (2016). Bitcoin wiki: Mining hardware comparison. https://en.bitcoin.it /wiki/Mining hardware comparison. Accessed 2016-11-14.
  6. Bortolotti, D., Pinto, C., and Marongiu, A. (2013). VirtualSoC: A full system simulation environment for massively parallel heterogeneous System-on-Chip. In Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshop & PhD Forum.
  7. Dwork, C. and Naor, M. (1993). Pricing via Processing, Or, Combatting Junk Mail, Advances in Cryptology. In CRYPTO'92: Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 740, page 139-147. Springer.
  8. Etherium Project (2016). Ethash specification. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash. Accessed 2016-11-14.
  9. Franco, Pedro (2014). Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering and Economics. John Wiley & Sons.
  10. Gervais, A., Karame, G. O., Wüst, K., Glykantzis, V., Ritzdorf, H., and Capkun, S. (2016). On the security and performance of proof of work blockchains. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'16).
  11. Guo, X., Srivastav, M., Huang, S., Ganta, D., Henry, M. B., Nazhandali, L., and Schaumont, P. (2012). ASIC implementations of vfie SHA-3 finalists. In 2012 Design, Automation Test in Europe Conference Exhibition (DATE), pages 1006-1011.
  12. Heirman, W., Sarkar, S., and Carlson, T. (2012). Poweraware multi-core simulation for early design stage hardware/software co-optimization. In Proceedings of the 21st international conference on parallel architectures and compilation techniques.
  13. Jungk, B. (2012). Evaluation of compact FPGA implementations for all SHA-3 finalists. In The Third SHA-3 Candidate Conference.
  14. Kaps, J.-P., Yalla, P., Surapathi, K. K., Habib, B., Vadlamudi, S., and Gurung, S. (2012). Lightweight implementations of SHA-3 finalists on FPGAs. In The Third SHA-3 Candidate Conference. Citeseer.
  15. Kreku, J. (2012). Early-phase Performance Evaluation of Computer Systems using Workload Models and SystemC.
  16. Kreku, J., Tiensyrjä, K., and Vanmeerbeeck, G. (2010). Automatic Workload Generation for System-level Exploration based on Modified GCC Compiler. In Proceedings of the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition.
  17. Latif, K., Rao, M. M., Aziz, A., and Mahboob, A. (2012). Efficient hardware implementations and hardware performance evaluation of SHA-3 finalists. In The Third SHA-3 Candidate Conference.
  18. Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. https://bitcointalk.org/bitcoin.pdf.
  19. Papaefstathiou, I., Chrysos, G., and Sarakis, L. (2015). COSSIM: A Novel, Comprehensible, Ultra-Fast, Security-Aware CPS Simulator.
  20. Pessl, P. and Hutter, M. (2013). Pushing the limits of SHA3 hardware implementations to fit on RFID. In International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, pages 126-141. Springer.
  21. Posadas, H., Real, S., and Villar, E. (2011). M3-Scope: Performance modelling of multi-processor embedded systems for fast design space exploration.
  22. Rittinghaus, M., Miller, K., Hillenbrand, M., and Bellosa, F. (2013). SimuBoost: Scalable Parallelization of Functional System Simulation. In 11th International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis.
  23. Schwabe, P., Yang, B.-Y., and Yang, S.-Y. (2012). SHA-3 on ARM11 processors. In International Conference on Cryptology in Africa, pages 324-341. Springer.
  24. Van Stralen, P. and Pimentel, A. (2010). Scenario-based design space exploration of MPSoCs. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Design.
  25. Wood, G. (2014). Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Project Yellow Paper.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Kreku J., Vallivaara V., Halunen K. and Suomalainen J. (2017). Evaluating the Efficiency of Blockchains in IoT with Simulations . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS, ISBN 978-989-758-245-5, pages 216-223. DOI: 10.5220/0006240502160223


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iotbds17,
author={Jari Kreku and Visa Vallivaara and Kimmo Halunen and Jani Suomalainen},
title={Evaluating the Efficiency of Blockchains in IoT with Simulations},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS,},
year={2017},
pages={216-223},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006240502160223},
isbn={978-989-758-245-5},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS,
TI - Evaluating the Efficiency of Blockchains in IoT with Simulations
SN - 978-989-758-245-5
AU - Kreku J.
AU - Vallivaara V.
AU - Halunen K.
AU - Suomalainen J.
PY - 2017
SP - 216
EP - 223
DO - 10.5220/0006240502160223