Design and Implementation Aspects of a novel Java P2P Simulator with GUI

📝 Abstract

Peer-to-peer networks consist of thousands or millions of nodes that might join and leave arbitrarily. The evaluation of new protocols in real environments is many times practically impossible, especially at design and testing stages. The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation aspects of a new Java based P2P simulator that has been developed to support scalability in the evaluation of such P2P dynamic environments. Evolving the functionality presented by previous solutions, we provide a friendly graphical user interface through which the high-level theoretic researcher/designer of a P2P system can easily construct an overlay with the desirable number of nodes and evaluate its operations using a number of key distributions. Furthermore, the simulator has built-in ability to produce statistics about the distributed structure. Emphasis was given to the parametrical configuration of the simulator. As a result the developed tool can be utilized in the simulation and evaluation procedures of a variety of different protocols, with only few changes in the Java code.

💡 Analysis

Peer-to-peer networks consist of thousands or millions of nodes that might join and leave arbitrarily. The evaluation of new protocols in real environments is many times practically impossible, especially at design and testing stages. The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation aspects of a new Java based P2P simulator that has been developed to support scalability in the evaluation of such P2P dynamic environments. Evolving the functionality presented by previous solutions, we provide a friendly graphical user interface through which the high-level theoretic researcher/designer of a P2P system can easily construct an overlay with the desirable number of nodes and evaluate its operations using a number of key distributions. Furthermore, the simulator has built-in ability to produce statistics about the distributed structure. Emphasis was given to the parametrical configuration of the simulator. As a result the developed tool can be utilized in the simulation and evaluation procedures of a variety of different protocols, with only few changes in the Java code.

📄 Content

Design and Implementation Aspects of a novel Java P2P Simulator with GUI V. Chrissikopoulosa, G. Papaloukopoulosb, E. Sakkopoulosb, S. Sioutasa,* a Informatics Dept., Ionian University, Corfu, Greece
b Computer Engineering & Informatics Department, University of Patras, Greece {vchris,sioutas}@ionio.gr, {papalukg, sakkopul}@ceid.upatras.gr

Abstract Peer-to-peer networks consist of thousands or millions of nodes that might join and leave arbitrarily. The evaluation of new protocols in real environments is many times practically impossible, especially at design and testing stages. The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation aspects of a new Java based P2P simulator that has been developed to support scalability in the evaluation of such P2P dynamic environments. Evolving the functionality presented by previous solutions, we provide a friendly graphical user interface through which the high-level theoretic researcher/designer of a P2P system can easily construct an overlay with the desirable number of nodes and evaluate its operations using a number of key distributions. Furthermore, the simulator has built-in ability to produce statistics about the distributed structure. Emphasis was given to the parametrical configuration of the simulator. As a result the developed tool can be utilized in the simulation and evaluation procedures of a variety of different protocols, with only few changes in the Java code.

1. Introduction and Motivation In this paper we describe the design and implementation aspects of a novel P2P simulator. The developed simulator is based on a Message Passing environment where the peers are represented by Java threads and communicate with each other by sending and receiving messages. Three central levels can be distinguished in the developed tool. The first level is the system’s kernel where the peers, the network environment and the messages have been implemented. The second level is the user interface of the simulator which facilitates the P2P operations of the network under simulation (node joins, updates, leaves etc). And finally, the third level is the graphical user interface of our system that facilitate the evaluation and statistical analysis.
   There are a number of simulators presented in the P2P literature. An extensive and analytical peer to peer simulators survey has been presented recently in [7]. A large number of papers (~70) have been included in the survey, which stated which simulator they used. The majority of these papers (62%) used a specially created simulator for their own case study evaluation. Some of these simulators might possibly be the same, reused within research groups. However, even taking this into account, the number of custom-made simulators far outnumbers the use of known simulators. This is not an ideal state of affairs, both in terms of duplication of effort and for ease of comparison and replication of results. The authors of the survey believe that “the poor state of existing P2P simulators is the reason that much published research makes use of custom built simulators”.
   Overall Neicken et al [7] have found that a key drawback of the simulators is that they have no systematic and user friendly mechanisms to allow a user to gather statistics of a simulation run that is what leads to different evaluation-simulation tools for new P2P environments.
   To overcome such difficulties we propose a novel P2P simulator tool, which includes built-in features to facilitate the logging and production of systematic statistical results for the algorithms’ performance as well as the load balance of the distributed structure. Furthermore its friendly graphical user interface allows non- programmers - high-level researchers/designers of P2P systems to easily construct their overlay with the desirable number of nodes and evaluate its operations using a number of key distributions. Our prototype is publicly available and free to download [8]. We evaluated our prototype simulator using the NBDT (Nested Balanced Distributed Tree) [1], a fault tolerant discovery-search infrastructure for P2P Web Service discovery.

• Contact author: Spyros Sioutas sioutas@ionio.gr; authors appear alphabetically The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a short discussion of related popular P2P simulators. A short overview of the NBDT Network is given in section 3. Section 4 introduces the systems architecture. Section 5 analyses the peer/node structure. Section 6 and 7 describe the user interfaces. In section 8, experimental results are illustrated. Finally, section 9 concludes the paper.

2. Related Work on P2P simulators In the comparative P2P simulator survey of Neicken et al [7], there is a number of tools discussed. For independency, popular solutions are shortly discussed here.
   PeerSim [4] has been developed with extreme scalability and support for dynamicity in mind. It is composed of two sim

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