Performance Considerations for Edge Blockchain Systems in Emerging 5G Data Networks

As edge computing applications become increasingly relevant to society, data processing and storage requirements are expected to increase at the 5G networked edge. At the same time, with the emergence of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, one can provide support for trust, immutability, and transparency to share information among networked entities at the edge and in the cloud in 5G networks. A performance model for a permissioned private blockchain platform is developed. Depending on the latency sensitivity and throughput requirements of a 5G edge application, different possibilities are explored to provide support for blockchain technology at the edge. In particular, applications to 5G use-cases are considered, and lazy ledger decoupling between the 5G edge and the 5G cloud is proposed to meet edge latency constraints.