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A decision tree for building IT applications

What to choose: blockchain or classical systems?

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Abstract

Blockchain technology has gained increasing attention from research and industry over the recent years. It allows implementing in its environment the smart-contracts technology which is used to automate and execute agreements between users. The blockchain is proposed today as a new technical infrastructure for several types of IT applications. This interest is mainly due to its core property that allows two users to perform transactions without going through a Trusted Third Party, while offering a transparent and fully protected data storage. However, a blockchain comes along a number of other intrinsic properties, which may not be suitable or beneficial in all the envisaged application cases. Consequently, we propose in this paper to design a new tool which is “a decision tree” that allows identifying when a blockchain may be the appropriate technical infrastructure for a given IT application, and when another classical system (centralized or distributed peer-to-peer) is more adapted. The proposed decision tree allows also identifying whether or not it is necessary to use the smart-contracts technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LISITE Laboratory, ISEP, 10 Rue de Vanves, Issy-les-Moulineaux, 92130, France

    Nour El Madhoun

  2. Orange Labs, 42 rue des Coutures BP 6243, Caen, 14066, France

    Julien Hatin & Emmanuel Bertin

Authors
  1. Nour El Madhoun
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  2. Julien Hatin
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  3. Emmanuel Bertin
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Correspondence to Nour El Madhoun.

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El Madhoun, N., Hatin, J. & Bertin, E. A decision tree for building IT applications. Ann. Telecommun. 76, 131–144 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-020-00814-y

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