A Framework for a Comprehensive Evaluation of Ant-Inspired Peer-to-Peer Protocols

Following a constant rise in the complexity and scale of peer-to-peer networks, researchers have looked at biological phenomena in order to develop self-organized, adaptive, and robust management systems. Our focus is on distributed swarm intelligence mechanisms that mimic the behavior of social insects to solve problems such as overlay management, routing, task allocation, and resource discovery. A central problem in the validation of novel networking solutions is their empirical evaluation under different conditions. Whereas existing network simulation platforms lack specific support for ant-inspired protocols (like transparent agent migration), dedicated frameworks for bio-inspired systems fail to implement accurate network models. To bridge this gap, we introduce a framework with support for bio-inspired techniques and realistic network underlay simulation based on Over Sim. To validate our work, we describe the implementation of several swarm-based protocols and we provide some measurements of the simulation performance.