SymBChainSim: A Novel Simulation Tool for Dynamic and Adaptive Blockchain Management and its Trilemma Tradeoff

Abstract

Despite the recent increase in the popularity of blockchain, the technology suffers from the trilemma trade-off between security decentralisation and scalability prohibiting adoption, and limiting the efficiency and effectiveness of the induced system. Addressing the trilemma trade-off calls for dynamic management and configuration of the blockchain system. In particular, choosing an effective and efficient consensus protocol for balancing the trilemma trade-off when inducing the blockchain-based system is acknowledged to be a challenging problem given the dynamic and complex nature of the blockchain environment. DDDAS approaches are particularly suitable for this challenge, and in previous work, the authors presented a novel DDDAS-based blockchain architecture and demonstrated that it offers a promising approach for dynamically adjusting the parameters of a system and optimising for the trade-off. This paper presents a novel simulation tool that can support and satisfy the DDDAS requirements for a dynamically re-configurable blockchain system. The tool supports the simulation and the dynamic switching of consensus protocols, analysing their trilemma trade-off. The simulator design is modular and allows the implementation and analysis of a wide range of consensus protocols and their implementation scenarios, along with the ability for parallelization. The paper also presents a quantitative evaluation of the tool.