ChainElastic: a cloud computing resource elasticity model for IoT-based blockchain applications
by Vinicius Facco Rodrigues; Josué Valtair Silva e Silva; Rodrigo Da Rosa Righi; Cristiano André Da Costa; Alex Roehrs
International Journal of Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies (IJBC), Vol. 2, No. 1, 2021

Abstract: Internet of things (IoT) environments are composed of a changing number of devices that produce data events at different rates. The development of blockchain solutions for such environments characterises an emerging trend of applications, thus requiring the system to be scalable. Nowadays, cloud computing technology became a standard solution to provide scalable environments for many types of applications through the cloud elasticity feature. However, when scale-in operations occur, cloud computing platforms operate by deleting virtual machine instances erasing all their data. In the blockchain scope, as each node has the entire transaction history stored, the data is lost, which requires new nodes to download all the history again before becoming operational. Consequently, those operations reflect a significant impact on the system's performance. In this context, this article proposes ChainElastic, a cloud elasticity model to run blockchain IoT applications that maintains the database history transactions from removed nodes. We developed a prototype that runs over the OpenNebula cloud, highlighting the benefits of using elasticity in terms of resource consumption, latency, and execution time. The experiments demonstrate gains of 39.64% in resource consumption with the ChainElastic model when comparing it against a scenario with fixed resources.

Online publication date: Sat, 25-Sep-2021

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