Discussion and Analysis

Our proposed blockchain-based solution for tracking the COVID-19 pandemic captures the main operations required for dynamically tracking the transmission and the current number of infected, recovered and deaths. In this section, we discuss the cost and security analysis of our proposed system. We also highlight the challenges and future directions for implementing the proposed system.

Cost Analysis

For operations to get executed successfully, a gas fee is required to be paid by stakeholders in the network. Hence, every line of code that is written in Solidity requires a certain amount of gas to get executed. The Ethereum gas is the unit used to measure the computational effort required for transaction executions. Ethereum transactions incur two types of costs during their execution. First, execution cost is related to the costs of changing states in the contract and internal storage while second is transaction cost which includes the execution cost along with the cost of sending data such as contract deployment and transaction input cost .
This gas amount is calculated by considering both the gas price and gas limit respectively. The former refers to the gas consumed in the contract and the latter refers to the total gallons of gas placed inside the smart contract gas tank . Moreover, it should be noted that as the gas price increases, the rate of adding verified transactions to each block increases. Accordingly, this price is expected to increase during high network traffic as miners compete to add transactions in the blocks to receive transaction fees. Table 2 shows the transaction and execution gases along with the corresponding transaction fees for deploying the contract and executing the major functions. The average gas price equal to 6 Gwei was obtained on April 10th, 2020 according to the ETH Gas Station . This transaction fee was converted to US Dollars at an Ether exchange rate of 1 ETH = 158.10 USD. We notice that the cost incurred by the stakeholders does not even exceed 5 USD. This implies that implementing the proposed solution is feasible and encourages cost-savings to all stakeholders in the network.
Table 2
Transaction Cost Incurred At An Average Gas Price Of 6 Gwei At An Exchange Rate Of 1 ETH = 158.10 USD