Recently, distributed ledger technologies like blockchain have been proliferating and have attracted interest from the academic community, government, and industry. A wide range of blockchain solutions has been introduced, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger technologies in the literature. However, tools for evaluating these solutions and their applications are still lacking, limiting the exploration of their potentiality and associated challenges/limitations. That is, experimenting with real blockchain networks usually requires a solid budget; and thus, sophisticated blockchain simulators can facilitate designing and evaluating solutions before the actual implementation stage. The quality of such simulators depends on several factors such as usability, reliability, provided capabilities, and supported features. This paper aims to provide a systemic mapping review of blockchain simulators focusing on these quality factors. This paper also sheds light on the configuration parameters (inputs) and produced metrics (outputs) supported by each simulator. Furthermore, it investigates which metrics supported by each simulator are scientifically validated/evaluated. Moreover, code quality comparison is carried out to assess the source code of the covered simulators. The results reveal that no simulator fully covers the wide operational range of features and capabilities of existing blockchain technologies. However, several promising efforts exist in the domain of blockchain simulation with interesting and useful features. Finally, we discuss the subject of blockchain simulation and provide our insight into the matter.
翻译:最近,分布式分类账技术,如铁链链,一直在扩散,引起了学术界、政府和产业界的兴趣。在文献中引入了一系列广泛的分类账技术,如Bitcoin、Eceenum和超链式技术。然而,评估这些解决方案及其应用的工具仍然缺乏,从而限制了对这些解决方案及其应用的探索潜力和相关挑战/限制。这就是说,试验真正的链链网络通常需要一个坚实的预算;因此,复杂的链链模拟器可以在实际执行阶段之前便利设计和评估解决方案。这种模拟器的质量取决于多种因素,如易用性、可靠性、提供的能力和得到支持的特性。本文旨在对以这些质量因素为重点的分类链模拟器进行系统的绘图审查。本文还介绍了配置参数(投入)和相关挑战/限制。该文件还提出了由每个模拟器支持的指标(产出)。此外,它调查了每个模拟器所支持的哪些有用的衡量标准是科学验证/评估的。此外,对代码质量的比较工作的质量取决于若干因素,例如易用性、可靠性、提供能力和得到支持的特性。本文件的目的是对以这些质量分析的系统模拟工具的源代码进行系统化审查,并充分揭示了我们所覆盖的链式技术的深度分析结果。