SymBChainSim: A Novel Simulation System for Info-Symbiotic Blockchain Management

Despite the recent increase in the popularity of blockchain, the technology suffers from the trilemma tradeoff between security, decentralisation and scalability, prohibiting adoption and limiting the efficiency and effectiveness of the induced system. Addressing the trilemma tradeoff calls for dynamic management and configuration of the blockchain system. In particular, choosing an effective and efficient consensus protocol for balancing the trilemma tradeoff 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 tackling this challenge. 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 blockchain system to optimise for the tradeoff. This article 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 tradeoff. The simulator design is modular and allows the implementation and analysis of a wide range of consensus protocols and their implementation scenarios. The article also presents a quantitative evaluation of the tool.