Hyperledger Umbra: Simulating Hyperledger Blockchains using Mininet

The simulation research internship during the summer of 2018 led to the creation of the Hyperledger Umbra Lab. Due to the overall difficulty of getting Hyperledger blockchain frameworks running under …

The simulation research internship during the summer of 2018 led to the creation of the Hyperledger Umbra Lab. Due to the overall difficulty of getting Hyperledger blockchain frameworks running under the Shadow simulation tool, work on the Umbra lab has slowed to a crawl. A different network tool called Mininet has been proposed as an alternative to using Shadow and it has the potential to drastically reduce the startup cost of getting a network emulation tool running Hyperledger blockchains. Umbra stands for a research project to test the feasibility of running Hyperledger blockchains under Mininet for the purposes of running scalability and consensus mechanism experiments.In 2019, Hyperledger Umbra was successfully implemented on Mininet, initially reproducing Fabric networks. Umbra can be extensible to emulate any Hyperledger project, and scalable to hundreds (even thousands - ongoing tests) of nodes.The aim of showcasing Umbra, demonstrating a blockchain network easily deployed in a laptop, consists in building the foundations for designing and conducting empirical computer science research experiments to help direct improvements in design and architecture of future versions of the Hyperledger blockchain platforms. Examples of such improvements include new consensus algorithms, broadcast/gossip protocols, and security mechanisms.In this technical presentation, Raphael V. Rosa is going to show Umbra, the platform architecture, its design principles and functionalities, how to create and run experiments on it, a Fabric network demonstration, and how to extend the platform to support other Hyperledger projects.