Towards a Blockchain Deployment at UAE University: Performance Evaluation and Blockchain Taxonomy

Blockchain technology initially developed for transactions on cryptocurrencies is now gaining popularity in major domains such as education, healthcare, media, government, smart computing, and business enterprise. Blockchain manages the transactions database in a decentralized way replicated on all the nodes with no single governing authority. In this paper, we present a classification and taxonomy of different blockchain development platforms and simulators along with their consensus protocols, the types of supported blockchain networks and programming languages. We also assess the performance of a blockchain application for deployment at the UAE University (UAEU) versus increasing number of nodes, blocks and block size, on top of experimental network latencies and bandwidth between the nodes. Our results show that a large-scale deployment of blockchain at UAEU is feasible.