Performance Modeling and Evaluation of the Inter-Blockchain Network : A Queuing Approach

Recently, cross-blockchain technology is becoming more and more popular in academia for its ability to address the interoperability problem of multiple blockchains. Inter-blockchain connection and communication is important for the performance of a cross-blockchain system. Latency of processing too many transactions crossing different blockchains may cause the congestion of the inter-blockchain network and negatively impact the performance of the whole system. Therefore, modeling and analyzing the performance of the inter-blockchain is necessary for the effectiveness understanding or performance optimization of a cross-blockchain technology. Many empirical and primary studies were conducted to model, simulate, and analyze the performance of a single chain rather than inter-blockchain network of multiple chains. To bridge this gap, our study proposed a theoretical solution based on queuing theory to model the inter-blockchain network in a typical technology reference implementation called BitXHub. Several performance measures parameters were obtained through the simulation model established, such as the rejection probability, the average queue length, the average response time, etc. Finally, we validated the proposed model with experiments to compare the actual and simulated statistics. The results verified the effectiveness of the proposed simulation model. Although this study only modeling one inter-blockchain network, we believe that the methodology can be expanded to a wide range of scenarios in other cross-blockchain systems