Towards a Common Interface for Overlay Network Simulators

Simulation has become an important evaluation method in the area of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) research due to the scalability limitations of evaluation test beds such as Planet Lab or G-Lab. Current simulators provide various abstraction levels for different underlay models, such that applications can be evaluated at different granularity. However, existing simulators suffer from a lack of interoperability and portability making the comparison of research results extremely difficult. To overcome this problem, we present an approach for a generic application interface for discrete-event P2P overlay network simulators. It enables porting of the same implementation of a targeted application once and then running it on various simulators as well as in a real network environment, thereby enabling a diverse and extensive evaluation. We established the feasibility of our approach and showed negligible memory and runtime overhead.