TrustChain for Smartphones
Measuring reconnection latency when the network is interrupted
A.M. Nicola (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Johan 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
TrustChain is a scalable, lightweight blockchain architecture that avoids global consensus by maintaining a personal chain of co-signed interactions for each peer, forming a directed acyclic graph. While its structure makes it promising for mobile and resource constrained environments, its behavior under real world conditions, such as the time it takes to restore connectivity, remains underexplored. This paper presents an implementation of TrustChain in Rust for Android mobile devices and evaluates its robustness under network disconnections across two protocols: UDP and Iroh over QUIC. Robustness is defined as the time elapsed between network connectivity restoration and the successful exchange of the first valid TrustChain message between peers. Experiments involved controlled Wi-Fi interruptions, measuring the reconnection time for each protocol. The findings reveal trade-offs between protocol simplicity and recovery performance. UDP demonstrated consistent low-latency reconnection times between 4 and 6 seconds, averaging 5 seconds, due to its stateless nature and lack of connection recovery overhead. In contrast, Iroh reconnection times ranged from 4.5 to 11.5 seconds, with most values between 6 and 8 seconds, due to QUIC's timeout strategy, DNS-based peer discovery, and relay reconnection overhead. The results provide insights for deploying decentralized systems in mobile contexts and highlight open challenges in peer reconnection for lightweight blockchain protocols. This study also proposes improvements and directions for future work, including multi-peer evaluation, measuring different Wi-Fi congestion levels, or experimentation with other network protocol stacks.