Comparative evaluation of dependability characteristics for peer-to-peer architectural styles by simulation

An important concern for the successful deployment of a dependable system is its quality of service (QoS), which is significantly influenced by its architectural style. We propose the comparative evaluation of architectural styles by simulation. Our approach integrates architectural styles and concrete architectures to enable early design-space exploration in order to predict the QoS of peer-to-peer systems. We illustrate the approach via two case studies where availability of resources and performance of peer-to-peer search methods are evaluated. Based on our experience with these simulation environments, we sketch tool support for simulating architectural changes at runtime.