With the increasing demand for communication between blockchains, improving the performance of cross-chain communication protocols becomes an emerging challenge. We take a first step towards analyzing the limitations of cross-chain communication protocols by comprehensively evaluating Cosmos Network's Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol. To achieve our goal we introduce a novel framework to guide empirical evaluations of cross-chain communication protocols. We implement an instance of our framework as a tool to evaluate the IBC protocol. Our findings highlight several challenges, such as high transaction confirmation latency, bottlenecks in the blockchain's RPC implementation and concurrency issues that hinder the scalability of the cross-chain message relayer. We also demonstrate how to reduce the time required to complete cross-chain transfers by up to 70% when submitting large amounts of transfers. Finally, we discuss challenges faced during deployment with the objective of contributing to the development and advancement of cross-chain communication.

翻译：随着区块链间通信需求的日益增长，提升跨链通信协议的性能成为一项新兴挑战。我们通过全面评估Cosmos网络的跨区块链通信协议，迈出了分析跨链通信协议局限性的第一步。为实现这一目标，我们引入了一个新颖的框架，用于指导跨链通信协议的实证评估。我们将该框架的一个实例实现为评估IBC协议的工具。我们的研究结果揭示了若干挑战，例如高交易确认延迟、区块链RPC实现中的瓶颈以及阻碍跨链消息中继器可扩展性的并发问题。我们还展示了在提交大量转账时，如何将完成跨链转账所需的时间减少高达70%。最后，我们讨论了部署过程中遇到的挑战，旨在为跨链通信的发展与进步做出贡献。