RBlockSim: Parallel and Distributed Simulation for Blockchain Benchmarking

Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain technology’s popularity has been rapidly on the rise. This has led to and benefitted from the introduction of numerous new implementations addressing specific needs in terms of performance, scalability, privacy, etc. Developing new implementations requires making design choices that deeply influence the blockchain’s behaviour. Although deploying full-scale networks for evaluation is impractical and costly, simulation offers a safe and convenient environment to test and benchmark different implementations against the requirements. Although single-threaded simulation of blockchain networks is available, it can incur long execution times when simulating large-scale scenarios. Additionally, it is constrained by the machine’s RAM, limiting the size of networks one may study. In this paper, we introduce and benchmark RBlockSim, a simulation approach that leverages optimistic parallel and distributed discrete-event simulation to overcome the above limitations and provides a modular, high-performance test-bed for blockchain evaluation.