Simulating Peer-to-Peer networks

The Gnutella protocol of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has undergone several changes since its inception in the beginning of this century. However, despite the large number of revisions to the original version of the protocol, Gnutella suffers from serious problems of dead searches, complexity in study of network topology and network overloading. In this paper, we report the development of a new P2P simulator, PeerNS, which was built to study different problems of P2P networks and Gnutella, including those mentioned above. PeerNS works on actual P2P network statistics and, hence, it is very close to the real scenario. Moreover, we also discuss the implementation and the integration issues involved in using PeerNS to simulate our crawling-based algorithm, which could minimize the number of dead searches in the network and enhance the availability of information across the network.