BlockEmulator: An Emulator Enabling to Test Blockchain Sharding Protocols

Abstract

Numerous blockchain simulators have been proposed to allow researchers to simulate mainstream blockchains. However, we have not yet found a testbed that lets researchers develop and evaluate new consensus algorithms or protocols for blockchain sharding systems. To fill this gap, we developed BlockEmulator as an experimental platform, particularly for emulating blockchain sharding mechanisms. BlockEmulator adopts a lightweight blockchain architecture so developers can focus only on implementing their new protocols or mechanisms. Using BlockEmulator's layered modules and useful programming interfaces, researchers can implement a new protocol with minimal effort. In two steps, we test BlockEmulator's functionality. First, we prove the correctness of BlockEmulator's emulation results by comparing theoretical analysis with observed experimental results. Second, other experiments show that BlockEmulator can measure a range of metrics, including throughput, transaction confirmation latency, cross-shard transaction ratio, the queuing status of transaction pools, workload distribution across blockchain shards, etc. We have made BlockEmulator open-source on GitHub.