Benchmarking Performance of Ethereum Blockchain on Resource Constrained Devices

Blockchain has challenged many of the conventions around digital security. In essence, blockchain supports a decentralized platform maintained by peers instead of a single entity. Furthermore, the data in the blockchain is immutable and is being held in a secure and encrypted way. However, running the blockchain on resource-limited devices, such as a consumer PC or a low-power Raspberry Pi as opposed to dedicated servers, is demanding due to the resource limitation in energy, memory, and time taken to validate the transaction on the blockchain. This paper explores these limitations by evaluating and benchmarking the blockchain framework Geth: a terminal interface for the Ethereum blockchain which makes it possible to create a private blockchain in addition to joining the actual blockchain. This article employs a private blockchain within Geth and benchmarks the blockchain to highlight the differences (and limitations) between the devices. Specifically, we make the following observations: (i) the time it takes to validate and add the transaction to the blockchain on a Raspberry Pi 4 is markedly slower compared to an Intel i9-10885H CPU @ 2.40GHz, (ii) the transaction between PCs compared to transactions between Pis is around two orders of magnitude higher. These valuable insights can be used to help researchers in the design and implementation of blockchain-driven security architectures for distributed systems, such as industrial IoT deployments and UAV swarms.