AN ADVANCED SIMULATOR FOR EVALUATING PERFORMANCE OF PEER-TO-PEER PROTOCOLS

In the domain of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking different protocols are evolving to make sharing of resources or information retrieval more efficient. The goals of advanced protocols are to reduce the number of messages sent and increase the hit rate of finding the requested resource. There are two main approaches to prove the efficiency of a P2P protocol. The first is to estimate the results with mathematical models; the sec-ond way could be the actual simulation of the particular P2P network. The latter approach is also suitable for experimenting with protocol modifications. The GXS Peer-to-Peer Simulator introduced in this paper is flex-ible enough to support nodes implementing different protocols, run defined test cases, and to gather statistics from any properties of the simulated network. GXS – besides of actually being utilized for P2P development – is a great tool for educational purposes, where high-level abstractions (“send the message”, “handle incoming message”) serve understanding better than looking at and trying to modify an actual, multi-threaded network-ing code