Performance Analysis of the IOTA Chrysalis on Heterogeneous Devices

Existing Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) based models like blockchain pose scalability and performance challenges for IoT systems due to resource-demanding Proof of Work (PoW), slow transaction confirmation rates, and high costs. Against a need to adopt a viable approach, especially for low-power IoT devices, IOTA emerges as a promising technology, leveraging the Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) based approach called Tangle for IoT-focused applications. In this paper, we design a system enabling secure data exchange between IoT devices on IOTA Chrysalis, the latest version. We perform extensive experiments on two machines, a Workstation PC and Raspberry Pi, to demonstrate the performance gap between powerful and low-power devices. Our findings show that even low-power devices, such as Raspberry Pi, perform well with small payload sizes on the Chrysalis network but face challenges with larger payloads. We observe that variation in transmission time increases as payload size grows, indicating the impact of PoW complexity, but it still is feasible for Raspberry Pi. We further validated our experimental setup to ensure the validity and accuracy of our approach through discussions with the IOTA Foundation’s technical team.