Design and Validation of BlockEval, a Blockchain Simulator

In this repository, we introduce the design and architecture of our blockchain simulator, BlockEval, which mimics the behaviour of concurrent operations that occur in a real-life blockchain system.

The complete design and validation procedure can be found on IEEExplore, accepted by 2021 International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS).

BlockEval can be extended to simulate any blockchain framework. In the provided implementation, we show the Proof-of-Work implementation of BlockEval.

We use Python (3.7+) and Simpy, a popular process-based discrete-event simulation framework developed in standard Python to implement the simulator.

Installation Instructions

• Clone the github repo

git clone https://github.com/deepakgouda/BlockEval.git 

• Install Python 3.7+
• Install the necessary packages using cd BlockEval && pip install -r requirements.txt

Setup Instructions

• Create directories params, dumps and output in the current directory.

mkdir params dumps output

• Define the necessary parameters in params.json and move it into params folder.

mv params.json params/

• Run the simulator using

python simulate.py params/params.json dumps/netDump.pkl > output/output.log 

• Find the output logs in output/output.log.
• Further statistics can be drawn from the pickle dump file dumps/netDump.pkl. It is a python dict containing the neighbour list, location, blockchain, data statistics of each node in the network.

>>> with open("dumps/netDump.pkl", "rb") as f:
        netDump = pickle.load(f)