Efficient Simulation of Large-Scale P2P Networks: Modeling Network Transmission Times

The ongoing process of globalization leads to a huge demand for highly scalable applications that are able to deal with millions of participants distributed all over the world. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology enables an arbitrary large number of users to participate in distributed services like content distribution or collaboration tools. In order to verify a new protocol's performance and scalability simulation is a commonly used tool. First, predicting the network and peer behavior in the real world is only feasible if the simulation, i.e. all applied models as well as the peer state, is as realistic as possible. Second, many properties of the system only become observable when the number of participants is sufficiently large. Therefore, verifying the scalability of a system requires simulating huge worldwide networks. Due to limited processing power, central memory and availabe time, both requirements can only be fullfilled if the applied models are very efficient. In this paper we take a closer look at the network layer. We compare the most commonly-used network models and present a very efficient model for applying real-world network transmission times in large scale simulations