A Systematic Review and Empirical Analysis of Blockchain Simulators

In recent years, distributed ledger technologies, and especially blockchain, have gained tremendous interest from academia, government, and industry. Although various blockchain-based solutions were created, the lack of tools to evaluate these complex distributed systems may hinder the development of the field. Many advantages of blockchain systems can be demonstrated only at large scales, e.g., using thousands of nodes. An investigation of different implementations and design choices is complicated and hardly feasible on real systems. Meanwhile, blockchain simulators give the possibility to repeat the complex real-world processes at a low cost. This work provides the first and an up-to-date systematic review and empirical analysis of blockchain simulators. Simulators are easily extensible and can test the performance of distributed ledgers using different settings and parameters on a single computer. The features and limitations of selected simulators are summarized and experimentally validated. Finally, recommendations for potential future research directions in the field are provided.