BlockSim: An Extensible Simulation Tool for Blockchain Systems

被引：49
作者：
Alharby, Maher [1 ,2 ]
van Moorsel, Aad [1 ]
机构：
[1] Newcastle Univ, Sch Comp, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Tyne & Wear, England
[2] Taibah Univ, Dept Comp Sci, Medina, Saudi Arabia
来源：
FRONTIERS IN BLOCKCHAIN | 2020年 / 3卷
关键词：
blockchain; performance; simulation; analysis; proof of work; consensus; Ethereum; Bitcoin;
D O I：
10.3389/fbloc.2020.00028
中图分类号：
TP [自动化技术、计算机技术];
学科分类号：
0812 ;
摘要：
Both in the design and deployment of blockchain solutions many performance-impacting configuration choices need to be made. We introduce BlockSim, a framework and software tool to build and simulate discrete-event dynamic systems models for blockchain systems. BlockSim is designed to support the analysis of a large variety of blockchains and blockchain deployments as well as a wide set of analysis questions. At the core of BlockSim is a Base Model, which contains the main model constructs common across various blockchain systems organized in three abstraction layers (network, consensus, and incentives layer). The Base Model is usable for a wide variety of blockchain systems and can be extended easily to include system or deployment particulars. The BlockSim software tool provides a simulator that implements the Base Model in Python. The paper describes the Base Model, the simulator implementation, and the application of BlockSim to Bitcoin, Ethereum and other consensus algorithms. We validate BlockSim simulation results by comparison with performance results from actual systems and from other studies in the literature. We close the paper by a BlockSim simulation study of the impact of uncle blocks rewards on mining decentralization, for a variety of blockchain configurations.
引用
收藏
页数：16
相关论文
共 28 条
  • [11] Buterin V., 2016, T SPAM ATTACK NEXT S
  • [12] De Angelis S., 2018, Tech. Rep.
  • [13] Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network
    Decker, Christian
    Wattenhofert, Roger
    [J]. 13TH IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PEER-TO-PEER COMPUTING (P2P), 2013,
  • [14] Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable
    Eyal, Ittay
    Sirer, Emin Gun
    [J]. COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM, 2018, 61 (07) : 95 - 102
  • [15] Fishman G, 2001, SPRING S OPERAT RES
  • [16] Gervais A., 2016, P 2016 ACM SIGSAC C, P3, DOI [DOI 10.1145/2976749.2978341, 10.1145/2976749.2978341]
  • [17] Bitcoin blockchain dynamics: The selfish-mine strategy in the presence of propagation delay
    Goebel, J.
    Keeler, H. P.
    Krzesinski, A. E.
    Taylor, P. G.
    [J]. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION, 2016, 104 : 23 - 41
  • [18] Haverkort B.R., 1998, PERFORMANCE COMPUTER, DOI [10.1002/0470841923, DOI 10.1002/0470841923]
  • [19] Leemis Lawrence M., 2006, DISCRETE EVENT SIMUL
  • [20] Mills Aaron, 2015, 2015 25th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), P1, DOI 10.1109/FPL.2015.7293752
123