A Generic Peer-to-Peer Network Simulator

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are emerging as a “new” form of distributed computing with a strong emphasis on selforganization, decentralization and autonomy of the participating nodes. Self-organization, autonomy and decentralization allow for highly adaptive, robust and scalable networks making P2P an increasingly interesting way to design distributed systems. Unfortunately it is still very difficult to develop P2P applications due to the complex and ill understanding of interdependencies between the users, application, protocol and physical network. Furthermore, the P2P topology and the underlying network topology can greatly influence the behavior of the P2P system. This paper provides an overview of P2P protocols and a review of existing simulators. Based on the shortcomings of existing simulators a novel layered simulator for P2P networks i s introduced and evaluated.