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Blockchain Queue Theory

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Computational Data and Social Networks (CSoNet 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11280))

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Abstract

Blockchain has many benefits including decentralization, availability, persistency, consistency, anonymity, auditability and accountability, and it also covers a wide spectrum of applications ranging from cryptocurrency, financial services, reputation system, Internet of Things, sharing economy to public and social services. Not only may blockchain be regarded as a by-product of Bitcoin cryptocurrency systems, but also it is a type of distributed ledger technologies through using a trustworthy, decentralized log of totally ordered transactions. By summarizing the literature of blockchain, it is found that more and more important research is to develop basic theory, for example, mathematical models (Markov processes, queueing theory and game models) for mining management and consensus mechanism, performance analysis and optimization of blockchain systems. In this paper, we develop queueing theory of blockchain systems and provide system performance evaluation. To do this, we design a Markovian batch-service queueing system with two different service stages, which are suitable to well express the mining process in the miners pool and the building of a new blockchain. By using the matrix-geometric solution, we obtain a system stable condition and express three key performance measures: (a) The average number of transactions in the queue, (b) the average number of transactions in a block, and (c) the average transaction-confirmation time. Finally, we use numerical examples to verify computability of our theoretical results. Although our queueing model here is simple only under exponential or Poisson assumptions, our analytic method will open a series of potentially promising research in queueing theory of blockchain systems.

Quan-Lin Li was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No. 71671158 and No. 71471160, and by the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei province under grant No. G2017203277.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management Sciences, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, 066004, China

    Quan-Lin Li & Jing-Yu Ma

  2. School of Science, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, 066004, China

    Yan-Xia Chang

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  1. Quan-Lin Li
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  2. Jing-Yu Ma
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Correspondence to Quan-Lin Li .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Texas Southern University, Houston, TX, USA

    Xuemin Chen

  2. Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Arunabha Sen

  3. Texas Southern University, Houston, TX, USA

    Wei Wayne Li

  4. University of Florida, Gainesville, AL, USA

    My T. Thai

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Li, QL., Ma, JY., Chang, YX. (2018). Blockchain Queue Theory. In: Chen, X., Sen, A., Li, W., Thai, M. (eds) Computational Data and Social Networks. CSoNet 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11280. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04648-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04648-4_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04647-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04648-4

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