Testing and Validation of Peer-to-peer Systems. (Test et Validation des Systémes Pair-à-pair)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) offers good solutions for many applications such as large data sharing and collaboration in social networks. Thus, it appears as a powerful paradigm to develop scalable distributed applications, as reflected by the increasing number of emerging projects based on this technology. However, building trustworthy P2P applications is difficult because they must be deployed on a large number of autonomous nodes, which may refuse to answer to some requests and even leave the system unexpectedly. This volatility of nodes is a common behavior in P2P systems and can be interpreted as a fault during tests. In this thesis, we propose a framework and a methodology for testing and validating P2P applications. The framework is based on the individual control of nodes, allowing test cases to precisely control the volatility of nodes during their execution. We also propose three different architectures to control the execution of test cases in distributed systems. The first approach extends the classical centralized test coordinator in order to handle the volatility of peers. The other two approaches avoids the central coordinator in order to scale up the test cases. We validated the framework and the methodology through implementation and experimentation on two popular open-source P2P applications (i.e. FreePastry and OpenChord). The experimentation tests the behavior of the system on different conditions of volatility and shows how the tests were able to detect complex implementation problems.