DCEA: a reference model for distributed ledger technologies

Badr Bellaj (1, 2, 3, 4) , Aafaf Ouaddah (4) , Emmanuel Bertin (5) , Noel Crespi (1, 2, 3) , Abdellatif Mezrioui (4)

1 IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris
2 TSP - RS2M - Département Réseaux et Services Multimédia Mobiles
3 R3S-SAMOVAR - Réseaux, Systèmes, Services, Sécurité
4 INPT - Institut National des Postes et Télécommunications [Rabat]
5 Orange Labs [Caen]

Bitcoin's notable success at operating autonomously as a global peer-to-peer network opened the door to a new revolutionary class of distributed systems: blockchain. However, with the rising popularity of this new paradigm, the concept of blockchain shifted greatly to the point where many systems marketed as "blockchain" without sharing the key components introduced by Bitcoin. It has therefore become quite challenging for system designers or decision-makers to achieve a sufficient understanding of different types of existing blockchains or to design and adopt the correct blockchain solution. To overcome this problem, we propose DCEA a holistic reference model for conceptualizing and closely examining blockchains and globally distributed ledger technologies (DLT) using a layer-wise framework that envisions all these systems as constructed of four layers: the data, consensus, execution and application layers.

Mots clés: Blockchain; DLT; Reference model

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Badr Bellaj, Aafaf Ouaddah, Emmanuel Bertin, Noel Crespi, Abdellatif Mezrioui. DCEA: a reference model for distributed ledger technologies. ICBC 2021: IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, May 2021, Sydney (online), Australia. pp.1-2, ⟨10.1109/ICBC51069.2021.9461129⟩. ⟨hal-03168829⟩