Performance Analysis of a Blockchain based Ubiquitous Mobile Data Capture System

Mobile devices are being used as sensors in several IoT networks as they are ubiquitous, and have the necessary technology to perform complex tasks. Nonetheless, these devices are often exposed to different types of malicious attacks, which compromise the integrity and confidentiality of the system. This paper analyses the performance of a blockchain based mobile application that can capture data readings from a digital meter and transfer it securely across a network. In the proposed solution, a mobile and a desktop application, as well as a local server was implemented in Java. The block chain encoding was performed by the mobile application and decoding by the local server. To analyse the performance of the system, parameters such as the number of blocks and the key length were varied and the time complexity, latency, throughput, decryption time, encryption time and likelihood of a brute force attack within the blockchain network was measured. The results obtained showed that the fewer the number of blocks, the lower the latency and the higher the throughput. However, the likelihood of a brute force attack within the system is greater when fewer blocks are used.