This is the official handbook of BlockEmulator (version 1.0).
View the updates of BlockEmulator here: Version Updates
Initiated by HuangLab (a research group in the School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China), *BlockEmulator is a blockchain testbed that enables researchers to verify their proposed new protocols and mechanisms. It supports multiple consensus protocols, particularly the blockchain sharding mechanism.
The main purpose of this testbed is to help users (researchers, students, etc.) quickly verify their own blockchain consensus protocols and blockchain-sharding protocols.
BlockEmulator is designed as an experimental platform that adopts a lightweight system architecture. It simplifies the implementation of industrial-class blockchains since BlockEmulator only implements the core functions of a blockchain, including the transaction pool, block packaging, consensus protocols, and on-chain transaction storage. It also supports common consensus protocols, such as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Proof of Work (PoW).
In particular, BlockEmulator offers the system-level design and implementation for blockchain-sharding mechanisms. For example, the cross-shard transaction mechanisms implemented by BlockEmulator include the following two representative solutions, i.e., i) Relay transaction mechanism proposed by Monoxide (NSDI'2019), and the BrokerChain protocol proposed by BrokerChain (INFOCOM'2022) PDF.
BlockEmulator is oriented toward blockchain researchers. It provides a blockchain experimental platform for quickly implementing their own algorithms, protocols, and mechanisms. It also offers very helpful functions to help researchers collect experimental data, facilitating their plotting experimental figures.
The following papers from HuangLab's publications have adopted BlockEmulator as an experimental tool.
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BrokerChain: A Cross-Shard Blockchain Protocol for Account/Balance-based State Sharding (published at INFOCOM 2022) PDF
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Achieving Scalability and Load Balance across Blockchain Shards for State Sharding (published at SRDS 2022) PDF
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tMPT: Reconfiguration across Blockchain Shards via Trimmed Merkle Patricia Trie (published at IWQoS 2023) PDF
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MVCom: Scheduling Most Valuable Committees for the Large-Scale Sharded Blockchain (published at ICDCS 2021) PDF
- Lightweight. BlockEmulator is a lightweight testbed platform for blockchain experiments.
- Fast Configuration. BlockEmulator enables users to set up their environments quickly and supports remote deployment on the Cloud.
- Customization. BlockEmulator is implemented using Goland language, which supports users' customization and modification.
- Easy to Conduct Experiments. BlockEmulator supports the replay of historical transactions of mainstream blockchains (such as Ethereum). It can automatically yield experimental log files. Using those log files, researchers can interpret plenty of metrics such as system throughput, confirmation latency of transactions, the queueing of the transaction pool, etc. This function is extremely helpful for researchers and students to facilitate their experimental data collection and plotting of experimental charts.
Quickly get started with BlockEmulator through the following document. Please refer to: BlockEmulator help document. More details of user guideline can be found at Handbook of BlockEmulator (Eng.) or Handbook of BlockEmulator (Chn.).
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[NSDI'2019 Monoxide] J. Wang and H. Wang, “Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with asynchronous consensus zones,” in 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 19), 2019, pp. 95–112.
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[INFOCOM'2022 BrokerChain] H. Huang, X. Peng, J. Zhan, S. Zhang, Y. Lin, Z. Zheng, and S. Guo, “Brokerchain: A cross-shard blockchain protocol for account/balance-based state sharding,” in Proc. of IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM’22), 2022, pp. 1–10.
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[SRDS'2022 Achieving] C. Li, H. Huang, Y. Zhao, X. Peng, R. Yang, Z. Zheng, and S. Guo, “Achieving scalability and load balance across blockchain shards for state sharding,” in Proc. of 2022 41st International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS’22), 2022, pp. 284–294.
An associate professor of Sun Yat-sen University, IEEE senior member. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of Aizu, Japan. He has served as a research fellow of JSPS, and an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University, Japan. His research interests include blockchain, Web3, metaverse, and distributed computing/protocols. He received the best paper award from TrustCom2016 and a best paper award runner-up from IEEE OJ-CS. He has more than 100 papers published in top journals such as IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) and IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), etc., as well as prestigious international conferences INFOCOM, ICDCS, SRDS, IWQoS, etc. He served as a lead guest editor for a blockchain special issue at IEEE JSAC. He is a PI or Co-PI of several blockchain-involved research projects funded by the National Key Research & Development Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), etc. He has published two blockchain books titled "From Blockchain to Web3 & Metaverse" and "Blockchain Scalability", both published by Springer in 2023.
Zheng Zibin (SM’16-F’23) received his Ph.D. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2012. He is a Professor at the School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, China. His current research interests include service computing, blockchain, and cloud computing. Prof. Zheng was a recipient of the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012, the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE in 2010, the Best Student Paper Award at ICWS2010, and the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award in 2010. He served as a PC member for IEEE CLOUD, ICWS, SCC, ICSOC, and SOSE.
Lin Jianru, a research scientist engineer, has rich experience in the design and implementation of decentralized systems, smart contract languages, and virtual machines. He is the translator of the Chinese edition of Highly Scalable Systems. He is also the technical mentor of HuangLab, a blockchain laboratory at Sun Yat-sen University. Visit url{ https://github.com/Jianru-Lin/ } to learn about his open-source projects.
Taotao Li is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, received his Ph.D. in cyberspace security from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022. The main research interests include blockchain theory and technology application, and the application of cryptography, including sidechain technology, cross-chain protocol, lightweight blockchain, and the application of cryptographic tools in blockchain. He has participated in a number of national/provincial key R&D projects, and published many papers in international academic conferences and journals. He participated in the development of BlockEmulator.
Xiaofei Luo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Sun Yat-sen University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Aizu in March 2023. His current research interests include blockchain, payment channel networks, and reinforcement learning. His research has been published in IEEE JSAC and other well-known international journals and conferences. He participated in the development of BlockEmulator.
Qinglin Yang, Ph.D., research fellow, and IEEE member, received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Aizu in March 2021. His research interests include intelligent edge cloud computing, federated learning privacy protection, and Web3. In recent years, he has published nearly 20 papers in international academic journals/conferences. He is also a guest editorial board member of the IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society (OJ-CS). He has participated in the research and development of a number of national key R&D projects and projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He participated in the development of BlockEmulator. He participated in the compilation of the blockchain textbook "From Blockchain to Web3", published by People's Posts and Telecommunications Press, and a blockchain book titled "From Blockchain to Web3 & Metaverse", published by Springer, 2023.
Qinde is a Ph.D. student at the School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests mainly include blockchain. In August 2022, he joined HuangLab and participated in the development of BlockEmulator.
Guang is currently a student pursuing his bachelor's degree at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, at Sun Yat-Sen University. His research interests mainly include Blockchain. Since joining HuangLab as an undergraduate intern in August 2021, he has participated in the development of BlockEmulator.
Zhaokang will enroll in the School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University in Fall 2023. His research interest mainly focuses on blockchain. In October 2022, he joined HuangLab to participate in the development of BlockEmulator.
Xiaowen is currently a student pursuing his M.Sc. degree at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, China. His research interests mainly include blockchain. In August 2021, he participated in the development of BlockEmulator.
Yue is currently a student pursuing his master's degree at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, at Sun Yat-Sen University. His research interests mainly include Blockchain. Since being a member of Huanglab in May 2021, he has been involved in two papers published in well-known conferences and journals. He is an early developer of the BlockEmulator.
Miaoyong is currently a student pursuing his master's degree at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests mainly include blockchain. he joined HuangLab in October 2021 and participated in the development of BlockEmulator.
Junhao is an undergraduate student at the School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University. In September 2022, he joined HuangLab as an intern and participated in the development of BlockEmulator.
If you publish work that uses BlockEmolator, please cite BlockEmolator as follows:
@misc{huang2023blockemulator,
title={BlockEmulator: An Emulator Enabling to Test Blockchain Sharding Protocols},
author={Huawei Huang and Guang Ye and Qinde Chen and Zhaokang Yin and Xiaofei Luo and Jianru Lin and Qinglin Yang and Zibin Zheng},
year={2023},
eprint={2311.03612},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CR}}