Performance Analysis of Blockchain-based Access Control Model for Personal Health Record System with Architectural Modelling and Simulation

Abstract

The Personal Health Record (PHR) could be seen as a preventive care solution to the incoming aging society. The blockchain-based PHR system has been proposed recently to enhance the security and privacy for the PHR data. Consequently, the performance becomes a concern for blockchain-PHR integration because of the blockchain performance issues in the past. Thus, this article presents the performance analysis of the blockchain-based PHR system to ensure the usability in practice. The proposed blockchain-based PHR system prototype is implemented and the architectural model for the blockchain-based PHR system is also constructed. The key parameters for the architectural model are extracted from the prototype. Experiments are conducted with various data sizes including 128, 512 KB, 2, 8 and 32 MB. The result shows that storing 32 MB of the PHR data takes 4.84 s and retrieving the same PHR data takes 5.19 s. The result of simulating the architectural model shows that the proposed blockchain-based PHR system can response within 4 min for 60,000 accesses each day. The performance results indicated that the proposed blockchain-based PHR system can work within the emergency response time of 8 min and it is usable with an efficient computational cost. Further evaluation on the distributed design of the proposed blockchain-based PHR system is planned for our future work.

Keywords

• Security
• cryptography
• palladio model
• health records