Transaction Latency Simulator

Discrete-event simulator for estimating transaction latency within permissionless blockchains.

Installation and Requirements

Before you can use the simulator, you need to have Python version 3 or above installed in your machine as well as have the following packages installed:

• pandas

pip install pandas

• numpy

pip install numpy

• sklearn

pip install sklearn

• xlsxwriter

pip install xlsxwriter

Running the simulator

Before you run the simulator, you need to configure the input parameter for the simulator by accessing the Sim.py class. The paramters that need to be set the end user are:

    Binterval -> Average block interval time (in seconds). The time between two consecutive blocks
    Blimit -> The block gas limit
    Tn ->  The arrival rate for transactions (i.e., the number of transactions to be created per second)
    Butilization -> The block utilization level (it ranges from 0.0 to 1.0), where 0.0 indicates empty blocks and 1.0 indicates all blocks are full
    simTime -> The length of the simulation time in seconds, corresponding to the real blockchain time
    runs -> Number of simulation runs

To run the simulator, one needs to trigger the Sim.py class either from the command line

python Sim.py

or using any Python editor such as Spyder.

Statistics and Results

The results of the simulator is printed in an excel file at the end of the simulation. The results include the blockchain ledger, number of blocks mined and details of transactions confirmed in the network. For every transaction, we record it gas related attributes, fees, creation time, time when it was recorded in the blockchain ledger and etc.

Contact

For any query about how to use or even extend the simulator, feel free to contact me [email protected]