Blockchain is an emerging technology that gained a lot of attention in the last years. Many different consensus protocols have been proposed to improve both the scalability and the resilience of existing blockchain. However, most of these solutions have been defined for rather static settings, where the system does not change or changes very slowly, mainly due to failures. Real networks might be subject to a progressive refreshment of the peers participating in the system, known as churn. Every blockchain protocol can be seen as the composition of three main distributed building blocks: a) overlay management protocol, b) communication layer, c) agreement primitive. In this work is proposed a modular approach for analyzing and comparing different consensus protocols used in blockchain under churn conditions. The results from the simulations carried out with the OMNeT++ discrete-event simulation framework help to clarify how these distributed blocks are related and how different churning models impact the blockchain.
In the PDF file present in this repo can be found the details about the thesis work and how the framework can be used in order to test other blockchain consensus protocols.