Impact of network delays on Hyperledger Fabric

Abstract

Blockchain has become one of the most attractive technologies for applications, with a large range of deployments such as production, economy, or banking. Under the hood, Blockchain technology is a type of distributed database that supports untrusted parties. In this paper we focus Hyperledger Fabric, the first blockchain in the market tailored for a private environment, allowing businesses to create a permissioned network. Hyperledger Fabric implements a PBFT consensus in order to maintain a non forking blockchain at the application level. We deployed this framework over an area network between France and Germany in order to evaluate its performance when potentially large network delays are observed. Overall we found that when network delay increases significantly (i.e. up to 3.5 seconds at network layer between two clouds), we observed that the blocks added to our blockchain had up to 134 seconds offset after 100 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> block from one cloud to another. Thus by delaying block propagation, we demonstrated that Hyperledger Fabric does not provide sufficient consistency guaranties to be deployed in critical environments. Our work, is the fist to evidence the negative impact of network delays on a PBFT-based blockchain.