An Empirical Smart Contracts Latency Analysis on Ethereum Blockchain for Trustworthy Inter-Provider Agreements
Farhana Javed, Josep Mangues-Bafalluy
TL;DR
This work analyzes a blockchain-based DApp for inter-provider agreements in 6G contexts, organizing four smart contracts into a Preliminary Agreement Phase and an Enforcement Phase. It empirically evaluates on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet how gas price, block size, and transaction count influence on-chain latency, using Kruskal-Wallis and Dunn tests with Cliff’s Delta for effect sizes. The study finds that heavy, storage-intensive operations dominate latency in the Preliminary Agreement Phase, making block capacity and throughput the key drivers, while lighter enforcement calls in the Enforcement Phase are more sensitive to gas-price fluctuations. The results provide design guidance for decentralized marketplaces, showing when to batch heavy updates, employ adaptive fee strategies, or leverage off-chain or Layer-2 solutions to smooth latency and control costs in multi-operator, beyond-5G resource sharing scenarios.
Abstract
As 6G networks evolve, inter-provider agreements become crucial for dynamic resource sharing and network slicing across multiple domains, requiring on-demand capacity provisioning while enabling trustworthy interaction among diverse operators. To address these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based Decentralized Application (DApp) on Ethereum that introduces four smart contracts, organized into a Preliminary Agreement Phase and an Enforcement Phase, and measures their gas usage, thereby establishing an open marketplace where service providers can list, lease, and enforce resource sharing. We present an empirical evaluation of how gas price, block size, and transaction count affect transaction processing time on the live Sepolia Ethereum testnet in a realistic setting, focusing on these distinct smart-contract phases with varying computational complexities. We first examine transaction latency as the number of users (batch size) increases, observing median latencies from 12.5 s to 23.9 s in the Preliminary Agreement Phase and 10.9 s to 24.7 s in the Enforcement Phase. Building on these initial measurements, we perform a comprehensive Kruskal-Wallis test (p < 0.001) to compare latency distributions across quintiles of gas price, block size, and transaction count. The post-hoc analyses reveal that high-volume blocks overshadow fee variations when transaction logic is more complex (effect sizes up to 0.43), whereas gas price exerts a stronger influence when the computation is lighter (effect sizes up to 0.36). Overall, 86% of transactions finalize within 30 seconds, underscoring that while designing decentralized applications, there must be a balance between contract complexity and fee strategies. The implementation of this work is publicly accessible online.