Evaluating Distributed Ledger Technologies in Small-Scale Environments

By enabling tamper-resistant and transparent record-keeping, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is redefining digital cooperation across a wide range of systems. While widely adopted in public, large-scale, low-trust environments such as cryptocurrencies, DLT’s potential in private, smaller and high-trust contexts remains largely unexplored. This thesis investigates the feasibility and performance of DLTs in a constrained, small-scale setting by developing a lightweight inventory management system for the Smart Room at Mälardalen University. To explore this, two complementary approaches were employed. First, a comparative theoretical analysis examined how the DLT platforms Hyperledger Fabric, IOTA, and Hedera behave in a conceptual two-node network. Second, a latency experiment measured transaction processing latency, assessing how transaction volume and ledger size impact system performance across two hardware configurations—a Raspberry Pi and a laptop. The comparative analysis revealed that while a two-node setup might be feasible, limitations in consensus mechanisms, fault tolerance and parallelism impact the practical viability of the platforms in such minimal deployments. The experiment demonstrated that while the laptop consistently outperformed the Raspberry Pi, the latter may still be a viable option for applications with limited demands. The results indicate that latency scales approximately linearly with transaction volume on both devices, albeit with a slower growth rate on the laptop. Additionally, performance remained stable with smaller ledger sizes but degraded significantly at 100000 previous transactions. By addressing these questions, the thesis expands current understanding beyond mainstream deployments, offering valuable insights into the applicability of DLTs in small-scale, resource-constrained systems.