BT-ARC: A Distributed and Decentralized Solution for Collaborative Research for Academia using Blockchain

The unique features and innovation potential of blockchain attract significant attention and widespread adoption by diverse industries, with education being one of the notable sectors benefiting from its application. A notable shift has occurred in the academic environment where distributed and decentralized collaborative research becomes a key element of generating knowledge and innovation. However, well-established research collaboration systems face challenges like data integrity, trust, security, transparency, and vulnerabilities associated with centralized databases. To overcome these challenges, this work proposes a blockchain-based framework for an academic research collaboration (BT-ARC) that uses public permissionless blockchain. This proposed framework uses a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism to validate the transactions over the peer-to-peer (P2P) network, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithm as an encryption method, Remix IDE, MetaMask wallet, and the Sepolia test network to deploy the proposed framework. We also present digital identity generation, research data storage, and research data access processes of the BT-ARC framework. We evaluate the performance of BT-ARC using the JMeater simulation toolkit. Our performance metrics for the assessment are throughput, latency, and response time. We consider a transaction range from 100 to 1000 for this performance assessment. The proposed framework achieves an average throughput of 339.5 TPS (i.e., transaction per second), a latency of 45.4 milliseconds, and a response time of 86.4 milliseconds. This initiative will constructively contribute towards resolving challenges within the education sector’s academic research collaboration (ARC).