A Proposed Architecture for Testing Consensus Mechanisms

A Proposed Architecture for Testing Consensus Mechanisms | Authorea try { document.documentElement.classList.add('js'); } catch (e) { } var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'G-8VDV14Y67G']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Skip to main content Preprints Collections Wiley Open Research IET Open Research Ecological Society of Japan All Collections About About Authorea FAQs Contact Us Quick Search anywhere Search for preprint articles, keywords, etc. Search Search ADVANCED SEARCH SCROLL This is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed. Data may be preliminary. 10 April 2026 V1 Latest version Share on A Proposed Architecture for Testing Consensus Mechanisms Author : Muni Kousic Kumar Reddy Thavva 0009-0001-8103-3386 [email protected] Authors Info & Affiliations https://doi.org/10.22541/au.177584903.30390637/v1 78 views 47 downloads Contents Abstract Supplementary Material Information & Authors Metrics & Citations View Options References Figures Tables Media Share Abstract The correct and resilient operation of distributed systems-spanning global financial ledgers, decentralized autonomous organizations, and peer-to-peer energy microgrids-depends fundamentally on the correctness of their underlying consensus mechanisms. These protocols must guarantee agreement on shared state among a collection of potentially faulty or adversarial nodes, upholding the dual properties of safety and liveness even under hostile conditions. Despite the growing diversity of consensus algorithms, from classical crash-fault tolerant approaches such as Paxos and Raft to modern Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) variants and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based structures, the research community lacks a unified architecture for their systematic, cross-platform evaluation. This paper proposes a modular, extensible framework called the Consensus Evaluation and Resilience Framework (CERF) to fill this gap. CERF integrates five core components: a high-fidelity network emulation layer, a pluggable system-under-test (SUT) adapter, a fault injection engine (FIE) capable of simulating both benign and Byzantine failure modes, a multi-dimensional performance monitoring unit (PMU), and a formal consistency checker. By decoupling the testing infrastructure from protocol implementation, CERF enables fair comparisons of throughput, latency, energy efficiency, and scalability. The proposed architecture draws on insights from seminal benchmarking works including BlockBench, Jepsen, and ByzzBench, and extends evaluation criteria to address modern challenges in IoT environments, post-quantum security, and DAG-based ledgers. Graph-theoretical principles are incorporated at the topology design stage to model network vulnerabilities and guide adversarial scenario construction. Supplementary Material File (consensus_testing_paper.pdf) Download 183.27 KB Information & Authors Information Version history V1 Version 1 10 April 2026 Copyright This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Keywords blockchain benchmarking byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanisms distributed systems testing fault injection graph theory paxos pbft raft software testing Authors Affiliations Muni Kousic Kumar Reddy Thavva 0009-0001-8103-3386 [email protected] View all articles by this author Metrics & Citations Metrics Article Usage 78 views 47 downloads .FvxKWukQNSOunydq8rnd { width: 100px; } Citations Download citation Muni Kousic Kumar Reddy Thavva. A Proposed Architecture for Testing Consensus Mechanisms. Authorea . 10 April 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.177584903.30390637/v1 If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. 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