Lightweight emulation to study peer-to-peer systems

Lucas Nussbaum (1, 2) , Olivier Richard (1, 2)

1 MESCAL - Middleware efficiently scalable
2 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble

The current methods used to test and study peer-to-peer systems (namely modeling, simulation, or execution on real testbeds) often show limits regarding scalability, realism and accuracy. This paper describes and evaluates P2PLab, our framework to study peer-to-peer systems by combining emulation (use of the real studied application within a configured synthetic environment) and virtualization. P2PLab is scalable (it uses a distributed network model) and has good virtualization characteristics (many virtual nodes can be executed on the same physical node by using process-level virtualization). Experiments with the BitTorrent file-sharing system complete this article and demonstrate the usefulness of this platform.

Mots clés: peer-to-peer; evaluation; emulation; network; virtualization; BitTorrent

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Lucas Nussbaum, Olivier Richard. Lightweight emulation to study peer-to-peer systems. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2007, 20 (6), pp.735 - 749. ⟨10.1002/cpe.1242⟩. ⟨hal-00334806⟩