Latency performance modeling and analysis for hyperledger fabric blockchain network

Blockchain has been one of the most attractive technologies for many modern and even future applications. Fabric, an open-source framework to implement the permissioned enterprise-grade blockchain, is getting increasing attention from innovators. The latency performance is crucial to the Fabric blockchain in assessing its effectiveness. Many empirical studies were conducted to analyze this performance based on different hardware platforms. These experimental results are not comparable as they are highly dependent on the underlying networks. Moreover, theoretical analysis on the latency of Fabric blockchain still receives much less attention. This paper provides a novel theoretical model to calculate the transaction latency under various network configurations such as block size, block interval, etc. Subsequently, we validate the proposed latency model with experiments, and the results show that the difference between analytical and experimental results is as low as 6.1%. We also identify some performance bottlenecks and give insights from the developer’s perspective.