PeerfactSim.KOM: A P2P system simulator - Experiences and lessons learned

Research on peer-to-peer (p2p) and distributed systems needs evaluation tools to predict and observe the behavior of protocols and mechanisms in large scale networks. PeerfactSim.KOM1[1] is a simulator for large scale distributed/p2p systems aiming at the evaluation of interdependencies in multi-layered p2p systems. The simulator is written in Java, is event-based and mainly used in p2p research projects4. The main development of PeerfactSim.KOM started in 2005 and is driven since 2006 by the project “QuaP2P”, which aims at the systematic improvement and benchmarking of p2p systems. Further users of the simulator are working in the project “On-the-fly Computing” aiming at researching p2p-based service oriented architectures. Both projects5 state severe requirements on the evaluation of multi-layered and large-scale distributed systems. We describe the architecture of PeerfactSim.KOM supporting these requirements in Section II, present the workflow, selected experiences and lessons learned in Section III and conclude the overview in Section IV.