Performance Evaluation of Authentication Public Blockchains

The internet of things (IoT) is an integrated, interconnected system of things without any human interaction. However, the lightweight internet of things devices have limited storage and processing capacity. Due to this limitation, a centralized authentication system was adopted on the internet of things. Unfortunately, the centralized authentication system has a lot of drawbacks, such as a single point of failure, cost, scalability, and bottleneck. Therefore, a decentralized system such as the public blockchain was introduced because it solves the drawbacks of decentralized authentication methods. This paper evaluates the performance of two authentication methods using a public blockchain. The two used blockchains for the evaluation are Rinkeby and Ropsten. The metrics used in the evaluation are time, CPU, and memory. These metrics are required in the authentication process during the association requests of members to their groups and in data message exchanges between them. The obtained results showed that Rinkeby is less time-, CPU-, and memory-consuming than Ropsten because it uses a proof of authority consensus algorithm, which depends on a lower number of participants, whereas Ropsten uses a proof of work consensus algorithm, which depends on a greater number of participants than a proof of authority.