Trustchain Mobile: A Low-Latency Smartphone Peer-to-Peer Transaction System
Performance analysis and benchmarking
V. Iftode (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
J.A. Pouwelse – Mentor (TU Delft - Data-Intensive Systems)
B. Nasrulin – Mentor (TU Delft - Data-Intensive Systems)
K.G. Langendoen – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Embedded Systems)
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Abstract
Mobile blockchain transactions require low latency for practical deployment. This paper presents a smartphone-native Trustchain system developed as part of a collaborative research project where five students implement Trustchain from scratch, each optimizing a different performance metric: latency, robustness, storage, throughput, and battery efficiency. This work focuses on latency optimization through a novel modular architecture implemented in Rust/Kotlin that enables runtime protocol switching—the first such capability in mobile blockchain implementations.
The evaluation compares two transport layers: a lightweight UDP implementation and a businessgrade P2P solution (Iroh). Testing on Android devices demonstrates end-to-end round-trip latencies from 11.8 ms under optimal conditions to 240 ms at extreme loads (500 MPS), with UDP achieving consistent 11.8ms median latency and Iroh showing 18.2ms for typical payloads. Results show clear trade-offs between protocol complexity and performance, providing guidance for selecting transport mechanisms in different mobile deployment scenarios. All code is released open-source to the Tribler project for reproducibility.