Mathematical Modeling of Transaction Latency on Ethereum

Applications on blockchain are currently limited by the relatively poor performance of the blockchain network such as low TPS, high latency and the resulting high transaction fees. Hence, performance optimization is one crucial problem of blockchain. Focusing on the most prosperous public blockchain Ethereum, we model the on-chain transaction confirmation process with the knowledge of Poisson process and queueing theory, derives the mean transaction-confirmation time, and explores the effect of different transaction fees on latency. We also conduct a numeric simulation of the model, which indicates that the model fits in well with the real world blockchain.