Peer-to-Peer Document Sharing using the Ant Paradigm

The peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm for building distributed applications has recently gained renewed attention, partly due to the enormous success of systems like Napster and Gnutella. Subsequently, a multitude of projects focusing on anonymity, security, routing and reliability aspects of P2P have been initiated. A framework that supports the design, evaluation and implementation phases of P2P application development is currently missing. The Anthill project is an attempt to fill this void. In this paper we give a brief overview of Anthill and describe Gnutant, a document sharing application that combine the scalability property of Freenet with the free search capabilities of Gnutella. In addition, we present preliminary simulation results obtained by running the Gnutant application in the Anthill simulation environment. The simulation results indicate that after an initialization period, Gnutant is effective in finding documents.