Simulating a P2P File-Sharing Network

In this technical report, we present our findings on network simulators, which can be used to help test and design a P2P system. The Portal-based P2P system under development uses portals to provide a user interface and P2P volunteers to provide resources to the network. The aim is to create an infrastructure that can be used by the scientific community, based on existing social networks, to help download and maintain large datasets. Network simulators provide a virtual network environment, which can potentially provide assurance for software developers, when making design decisions. This report outlines the architecture of the Portal-based P2P system and defines a set of criteria for a suitable simulator, to aid the development of the P2P system. A number of network simulators are reviewed and briefly tested for their suitability based on criteria. The experience gained from reviewing network simulators is presented in this report. 2

2003

The growing interest in peer-to-peer systems (such as Gnutella) has inspired numerous research activities in this area. Although many demonstrations have been performed that show that the performance of a peer-to-peer system is highly dependent on the underlying network characteristics, much of the evaluation of peer-to-peer proposals has used simplified models that fail to include a detailed model of the underlying network. This can be largely attributed to the complexity in experimenting with a scalable peer-topeer system simulator built on top of a scalable network simulator with packet-level details. In this work we design and develop a framework for an extensible and scalable peer-to-peer simulation environment that can be built on top of existing packet-level network simulators. The simulation environment is portable to different network simulators, which enables us to simulate a realistic large scale peer-topeer system using existing parallelization techniques. We demonstrate the use of the simulator for some simple experiments that show how Gnutella system performance can be impacted by the network characteristics.

15th EUROMICRO International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP'07), 2007

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks can reduce the distribution cost of large media files for the original provider of the data significantly. Thereby, the BitTorrent protocol is widely used in the Internet today. Most research work studies the protocol analytically, by simulations at the flow-level or real world experiments. Thereby, for flow-level simulations the influence of neglecting packet-level characteristics is not yet quantified. Therefore, this paper compares packet-level simulation results with flow-level values and analytically derived bounds. Our findings show that BitTorrent is near to optimal at flow-level for different scenarios. Naturally, packet-level results deviate more from the optimal values but differences are at most around 30% in our simulations. Furthermore, we show that the propagation delay can significantly influence the download performance of BitTorrent.

2006

Today, a large part of the traffic carried by the Internet is generated by file-sharing applications based on the P2P paradigm. Moreover, P2P traffic has particular features, quite different from the ones generated by "classical" data applications, and generally causes highly dynamic and distributed traffic matrixes that heavily stress network infrastructures. With this respect, it is reasonable to say that the analysis and study of the overall network performance have to take into account P2P traffic characteristics and behavior. To this purpose, the present paper approaches P2P traffic modeling activities, by describing a Gnutella simulator developed at the Telecommunication Networks and Telematics (TNT) Laboratory of DIST. The aim is well founded on the partial lack of simulators that effectively and completely describe the quantity, the characteristics and the impact of P2P traffic in networks.

11th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer Telecommunications Systems, 2003. MASCOTS 2003., 2003

Workshop on Techniques, Methodologies and Tools for Performance Evaluation of Complex Systems, 2005

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) based file sharing applications have become highly popular in today's Internet due to the spread of platforms such as Napster, Gnutella, KaZaa, eDonkey, BitTorrent, and others. There are several interesting issues in P2P-based file sharing applications that affect their performance. As their diffusion grew, the scientific community started to analyze these applications using analytical and mathematical tech- niques,

2008 Panhellenic Conference on Informatics, 2008

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.

2010

The peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm has greatly influenced the design of Internet applications nowadays. It gained both user popularity and significant attention from the research community, aiming to address various issues arising from the decentralized, autonomous, and the self-organizing nature of P2P systems [379]. In this regard, quantitative and qualitative analysis at large scale is a crucial part of that research. When evaluating widely deployed peer-to-peer systems an analytical approach becomes, however, ineffective due to the large number of simplifications required. Therefore, conclusions about the real-world performance of P2P systems can only be drawn by either launching an Internet-based prototype or by creating a simulation environment that accurately captures the major characteristics of the heterogeneous Internet, e.g. round-trip times, packet loss, and jitter.

2003

Peer-peer networking has recently emerged as a new paradigm for building distributed networked applications. In this paper we develop simple mathematical models to explore and illustrate fundamental performance issues of peer-peer file sharing systems. The modeling framework introduced and the corresponding solution method are flexible enough to accommodate different characteristics of such systems. Through the specification of model parameters, we apply our framework to three different peer-peer architectures: centralized indexing, distributed indexing with flooded queries, and distributed indexing with hashing directed queries. Using our model, we investigate the effects of system scaling, freeloaders, file popularity and availability on system performance. In particular, we observe that a system with distributed indexing and flooded queries cannot exploit the full capacity of peer-peer systems. We further show that peer-peer file sharing systems can tolerate a significant number of freeloaders without suffering much performance degradation. In many cases, freeloaders can benefit from the available spare capacity of peer-peer systems and increase overall system throughput. Our work shows that simple models coupled with efficient solution methods can be used to understand and answer questions related to the performance of peer-peer file sharing systems.

2009

P2P networks are scalable in serving multimedia files over Internet which is in contrast to the centralized client-server system in which the server provides all the resources to the clients. In this research, we have designed and implemented a Peer-to-Peer network simulator to efficiently serve multimedia on the Internet considering that P2P streaming applications scale very superior even in large crowd scenarios. Simulated data was used to conduct experiment from current popular multimedia serving websites such as YouTube. We have then simulated user traffic by using the P2P system to compare the performance result with the traditional Client-Server system.