Blockchain-Enabled Decentralized Services and Networks: Assessing Roles and Impacts

The rapid evolution of blockchain has established it as a critical enabler for decentralized zero-trust services and networks. Without relying on traditional trust mechanisms such as pre-established mutual trust or central authentication, blockchain facilitates trust-free services via smart contract. Smart contracts offer verifiable software trust for various blockchain-enabled services (BESs) while protecting participants’ interests. However, the impact of blockchain on BES remains underexplored and unclear. In this work, we consider a general BES framework suitable for diverse decentralized zero-trust services and assess the role of blockchain in BES. We first build an <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</i>/<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">G</i>/1-type queuing model for BES and establish the stability conditions using matrix analytic methods. Based on the stability conditions, we identify the blockchain scalability and server capability as two critical bottlenecks of BES. We further use a tandem queuing model to describe the BES latency of the assembling and service phases. We analytically characterize the properties such as the convexity of service-phase latency with respect to traffic intensity, and highlight the BES pooling effects from traffic offloading and resource sharing. At last, we verify our conclusions through simulations and explore potential pathways for more efficient BES frameworks.