Network Performance in Hyperledger Fabric - Investigating the network resource consumption of transactions in a Distributed Ledger Technology system

A blockchain is a distributed ledger comprised of practically unchange- able, digital recorded data in packages called blocks. Each block in the chain contains data and is cryptographically hashed. The blocks of hashed data draw upon the previous block in the chain, ensuring all data in the overall blockchain is untampered. Blockchain and Distributed Ledger ad- vantages are related to enhanced transparency in business applications and between the involved parties compared to using ordinary databases. Since the blockchain is cryptographically protected, it can be shared, al- lowing anyone to check the correctness of a transaction. Previously, this technology was mostly used for enabling public, decent- ralized digital currencies, known as cryptocurrencies, such as BitCoin and LiteCoin. In the latest years, however, additional use-cases have been de- signed, including non-money asset tokenization, digital identity and sup- ply chain management. Together with the rise of new use-cases, distrib- uted ledger technology frameworks emerged to assist and simplify the development process of such use-cases. These frameworks accelerate the development process at the cost of resource overhead. In this thesis, we use Hyperledger Fabric, a distributed ledger technology framework maintained by the Linux Foundation, to design, develop and analyze the performance of a use-case granted by DNV-GL. We explore the network resource cost of a transaction and model the network traffic flow. In addition, we measure and present the performance of this system and demonstrate why such a performance display alone is misleading