A Lightning Network simulation tool. The program is designed to assist with research on routing, fee markets, and misbehaving nodes on the Lightning Network.
This project is very much incomplete at present.
Each simulation trial is self-contained, generating a network topology from scratch based on the organic behavior of nodes sending transactions to one another and additional logic they are programmed with. Individuals nodes determine network topology -- it is not orchestrated at a higher level by, for example, explicitly instructing nodes to connect to specific other nodes.
The input to the simulation is a JSON specification file, which lists all nodes that will ever be active over the course of the run, a sequence of transactions that are to occur between nodes, and additional other signals that can be thought of as being provided externally by end users of the network clients. For example, an additional input in the specification file lists nodes that increase their budget to auto-connect to other nodes (eg. simulating the "autopilot" feature of LND).
lnsim uses the Gradle build system. If you don't know how to use Gradle, neither do I, so I recommend you use IntelliJ IDEA and it will do the right thing.
To run a simulation, you first need to generate a specification file. txSmear is a project that generates input specifications based on historical transactions from the Ethereum blockchain.
The program entrypoint is the edu.stanford.lnsim.SimulationRunner class.