A Systematic Literature Review Toward a Blockchain Benchmarking Framework

Abstract

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that focuses on the safe exchange of data between several distributed applications. Despite its widespread adoption, there are areas that require further research towards the understanding of their performance characteristics. In addition, consensus algorithms, a vital part of blockchain, require a more comprehensive understanding of their technical principles and characteristics. Along with the design of different types of consensus algorithms, several challenges, such as system scalability and power consumption, have been raised. Therefore, more comprehensive research is needed to investigate the degree to which consensus algorithms are built and how they perform. To this end, this study extends the body of knowledge and contributes towards the assessment of blockchain protocol performance. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of selected studies on blockchain performance, identifying similarities and differences while attempting to identify existing work on simulators and benchmarking frameworks that aim to explore the performance of blockchain-enabled consensus algorithms.