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