Performance analysis of lightweight Internet of things devices on blockchain networks

Abstract

Potential integration or cooperation of the Internet of things (IoT) systems and the blockchain technology is nowadays attracting remarkable interest from the researchers. These inter-operating systems often have to rely on low-cost, low-power, and robust IoT devices that can communicate with the blockchain network through smart contracts. In this work, we designed and ran a benchmark study for ESP32-based lightweight IoT devices interacting within the Quorum blockchain. A software library was built for ESP32 devices to enable elliptic-curve digital signing, Keccak-256 hashing, decoding, encoding, and secure private key generation capabilities, which all are the basic functional requirements for running a blockchain client. The running times and power consumption values of these essential operations were analyzed and discussed in detail. We also deployed two smart contract functions on the Quorum network and analyzed the performance of the IoT device while interacting via these methods. Further optimizations were proposed and implemented to speed up the processes and save energy, which resulted in a 2.5x increase in the transaction posting speeds and a 2/3 decrease in the energy costs. Another performance comparison between an ESP32 and a PC client was also provided with.