Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Blockchain
Sharding
Simulation Tool
BlockEmulator: An Emulator Enabling to Test Blockchain Sharding Protocols
🤖 AI Summary
Existing blockchain sharding research lacks a dedicated, verifiable simulation testbed, hindering rapid experimentation and evaluation of novel consensus protocols. To address this, we propose the first lightweight, scalable simulation platform specifically designed for sharding mechanism development. It features a modular, layered architecture and programmable APIs to significantly lower protocol implementation barriers. By integrating theoretical modeling with empirical simulation, the platform enables cross-validation of correctness. It supports precise, multi-dimensional performance quantification—including throughput, cross-shard transaction ratio, mempool queuing status, and shard load balancing. The platform is open-source, filling a critical gap in the sharding protocol experimental validation toolchain and providing a reliable benchmarking environment for sharding mechanism innovation.
📝 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.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Blockchain Sharding
Simulation Tool
Performance Metrics
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