BSELA: A Blockchain Simulator with Event-Layered Architecture

Abstract

Blockchain technology has found widespread use in various fields, including finance, healthcare, the Internet of Things, and supply chain management, due to its ability to meet technical and non-technical requirements. Therefore, it is crucial for system designers to evaluate the performance and characteristics of a given blockchain platform before deploying it. One way to achieve this is through the use of blockchain simulators. However, existing simulators have limitations in areas such as model scaling, event scheduling, time control, object model evaluation, and simulation magnitude. To address these limitations, we propose a Blockchain Simulator based on Event-Layered Architecture (BSELA) in this paper. BSELA comprises multiple functional modules with effective model scalability, with the core being our proposed Event-Layered Architecture. This architecture introduces a new event-driven scheduling mechanism for discrete-event simulation, which improves the efficiency, stability, and maintainability of event scheduling during blockchain simulation. Furthermore, we propose a time advancement mechanism for subsequent events based on event rounds, which improves the accuracy of time advancement, simulation complexity, and real-time demand handling capability during the simulation. We begin by validating the efficiency of our simulator by comparing experiments with those of existing blockchain simulators. We then validate the accuracy of BSELA through simulation experiments on blockchain network connectivity, block propagation latency, and the number of INV messages propagated per hour. We validated the accuracy of the experimental results by conducting a comparison with Bitcoin data. Finally, in order to address the research gap in the performance of blockchain systems at the underlying peer-to-peer network level and in other fields, we designed and experimentally validated the node-trust network construction mechanism by adjusting the simulator’s blockchain object model. Our experiments show that this tuning mechanism improves data transfer efficiency by 30%–40%, and also improves security. The design and experiments of the BSELA tuning mechanism validate the scalability and flexibility of our simulator for blockchain research.