Performance Analysis, Lessons Learned and Practical Advice for a 6G Inter-Provider DApp on the Ethereum Blockchain
Farhana Javed, Josep Mangues-Bafalluy
TL;DR
This study analyzes the performance of a multi-contract DApp for inter-provider agreements in 6G, implemented on Ethereum's PoS Sepolia testnet. By instrumenting six contracts across AD registration, service lifecycle, breach handling, penalty calculation, and funds transfer, it quantifies function-level gas costs, latency, and block-level utilization under realistic concurrency. Key findings show that cold writes and deep data structures significantly raise gas costs, while concurrency and block saturation push finalization times well beyond baseline, highlighting the need for storage flattening, batched onboarding, and dynamic transaction timing. The practical guidelines advance EVM-level design and transaction scheduling for large-scale, cross-domain telecom DApps, with implications beyond Ethereum to other EVM-based PoS networks.
Abstract
This paper presents a multi-contract blockchain framework for inter-provider agreements in 6G networks, emphasizing performance analysis under a realistic Proof-of-Stake (PoS) setting on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. We begin by quantifying Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based gas usage for critical operations such as provider registration, service addition, and SLA penalty enforcement, observing that cold writes and deep data structures can each inflate gas consumption by up to 20\%. We then examine block-level dynamics when multiple transactions execute concurrently, revealing that moderate concurrency (e.g., 30--50 simultaneous transactions) can fill blocks to 80--90\% of their gas limit and nearly double finalization times from around 15~seconds to over 30~seconds. Finally, we synthesize these insights into a practical design guide, demonstrating that flattening nested mappings, consolidating storage writes, and selectively timing high-impact transactions can markedly reduce costs and latency spikes. Collectively, our findings underscore the importance of EVM-specific optimizations and transaction scheduling for large-scale decentralized applications in 6G telecom scenarios. The implementation is available online.