A Blockchain Simulator for Evaluating Consensus Algorithms in Diverse Networking Environments

Abstract

The massive scale, heterogeneity and distributed nature of Internet-of-Things (IoT) presents challenges in realizing a practical and effective security solution. Blockchain empowered platforms and technologies have been proposed to address aspects of this challenge. In order to realize a practical Blockchain deployment for IoT, there is a need for a testing and evaluation platform to evaluate performance and security of Blockchain applications and systems. In this paper, we present a Blockchain simulator that evaluates the consensus algorithms in a realistic and configurable network environment. Though, there are several Blockchain evaluation platforms, they are either wedded to a specific consensus protocol and do not allow evaluation in a configurable and realistic network environment. In our proposed simulator, we provide the ability to evaluate the impact of the consensus and network layer that will inform practitioners on the appropriate choice of consensus algorithms and the impact of network layer events in congested or contested scenarios in IoT. To accomplish this a generalized representation for consensus methods is proposed. The Blockchain simulator uses a discrete event simulation engine for fidelity and increased scalability. We evaluate the performance of the simulator by varying the number of peer nodes and number of messages required to find consensus.