Evaluating Large Scale Distributed Simulation of P2P Networks

P2P systems have witnessed phenomenal development in recent years. Evaluating and analyzing new and existing algorithms and techniques is a key issue for developers of P2P systems. In this context, simulation is an important tool for P2P developers. However, such systems are often very large and few existing simulators offer the ability to execute simulations with an Internet scale. In this paper we utilize parallel discrete event simulation simulation techniques for executing large scale simulation of P2P systems which scale effectively, only limited by the amount of computational resource available (memory and CPU). We show results from a number of P2P protocols, indicating good scalability both in terms of size (memory) and execution time (CPU). The results demonstrate how the differences of these protocols and which of the underlying factors affect the performance of the distributed simulation infrastructure.