Digital Twins for Dynamic Management of Blockchain Systems
This addresses the need for dynamic management in blockchain systems to balance decentralization, scalability, and security, though it appears incremental in applying digital twins to this domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of managing the Trilemma tradeoff in blockchain systems by introducing a Digital Twin framework for dynamic adaptation, with simulations showing it effectively supports runtime reconfiguration.
Blockchain systems are challenged by the so-called Trilemma tradeoff: decentralization, scalability and security. Infrastructure and node configuration, choice of the Consensus Protocol and complexity of the application transactions are cited amongst the factors that affect the tradeoffs balance. Given that Blockchains are complex, dynamic dynamic systems, a dynamic approach to their management and reconfiguration at runtime is deemed necessary to reflect the changes in the state of the infrastructure and application. This paper introduces the utilisation of Digital Twins for this purpose. The novel contribution of the paper is design of a framework and conceptual architecture of a Digital Twin that can assist in maintaining the Trilemma tradeoffs of time critical systems. The proposed Digital Twin is illustrated via an innovative approach to dynamic selection of Consensus Protocols. Simulations results show that the proposed framework can effectively support the dynamic adaptation and management of the Blockchain