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 enables researchers to develop and evaluate their new consensus algorithms or new protocols for blockchain sharding systems. To fill this gap, we developed BlockEmulator, which is designed as an experimental platform, particularly for emulating blockchain sharding mechanisms. BlockEmulator adopts a lightweight blockchain architecture so developers can only focus on implementing their new protocols or mechanisms. Using layered modules and useful programming interfaces offered by BlockEmulator, researchers can implement a new protocol with minimum effort. Through experiments, we test various functionalities of BlockEmulator in two steps. Firstly, we prove the correctness of the emulation results yielded by BlockEmulator by comparing the theoretical analysis with the observed experiment results. Secondly, other experimental results demonstrate that BlockEmulator can facilitate measuring a series 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 in Github.