LUNES: Agent-based Simulation of P2P Systems (Extended Version)

TL;DR

LUNES is a modular, scalable agent-based simulator designed for large unstructured peer-to-peer networks, supporting complex protocol simulation and performance evaluation with high efficiency.

Contribution

The paper introduces LUNES, a novel, modular P2P network simulator supporting both sequential and distributed simulations with optimized communication overhead reduction.

Findings

LUNES effectively simulates large P2P networks with high performance.

The simulator accurately models protocol interactions in diverse network topologies.

Results confirm LUNES's scalability and efficiency in simulating gossip protocols.

Abstract

We present LUNES, an agent-based Large Unstructured NEtwork Simulator, which allows to simulate complex networks composed of a high number of nodes. LUNES is modular, since it splits the three phases of network topology creation, protocol simulation and performance evaluation. This permits to easily integrate external software tools into the main software architecture. The simulation of the interaction protocols among network nodes is performed via a simulation middleware that supports both the sequential and the parallel/distributed simulation approaches. In the latter case, a specific mechanism for the communication overhead-reduction is used; this guarantees high levels of performance and scalability. To demonstrate the efficiency of LUNES, we test the simulator with gossip protocols executed on top of networks (representing peer-to-peer overlays), generated with different topologies. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.