OverSim: A Flexible Overlay Network Simulation Framework

A fundamental problem in studying peer-to- peer networks is the evaluation of new protocols. This paper presents OverSim, a flexible overlay network simulation framework based on OMNeT++. It was designed to fulfill a number of requirements that have been partially neglected by existing simulation frameworks. OverSim includes several structured and unstructured peer-to-peer protocols like Chord, Kademlia and Gia. These protocol implementations can be used for both simulation as well as real world networks. To facilitate the implementation of additional protocols and to make them more comparable OverSim provides several common functions like a generic lookup mechanism for structured peer-to-peer networks and an RPC interface. Several exchangeable underlay network models allow to simulate complex heterogeneous underlay networks as well as simplified networks for large- scale simulations. We show that with OverSim simulations of overlay networks with up to 100,000 nodes are feasible.