SSS: Investigating Secure Scalable Solutions for Blockchain (An SLA Scenario)

Blockchain has been gaining attraction in a variety of industrial domains because of its security, decentralization, and transparency, however, it is believed that still thorough investigation is lacking in terms of how the level of difficulty in consensus algorithms affects the throughput and scalability of blockchain systems. An effort has been made to investigate this gap by performing a detailed empirical investigation with varying difficulty levels of PoW (Proof of Work) consensus algorithm using an SLA (Service Level Agreement) based scenario. It takes into consideration the impact of the number of nodes in our proposed system, the size of individual blocks, their speed of generation, and the rate of confirmation of transactions into the block of the main consensus chain. SLA-based transactions have been injected into the permissioned blockchain. The empirical analysis in the paper demonstrates that the rate of the number of transactions decreases as the system operates under a high level of difficulty with some degradation of performance.