Empirical Study of Peer to Peer Network Simulators

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have become an important part of the internet; millions of users have been attracted to use their structure and services. A P2P system can be defined as a distributed network architecture, whereby participants share a part of their own hardware resources such as processing power, storage capacity, or network bandwidth. The service or content provided by the P2P network is accessible by other peers directly, without passing intermediary entities. A simulation is an attempt to model a system in order to study it scientifically. Simulator tools are widely used for investigating overlay networks and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. Simulating P2P overlay networks is a common problem for researchers and developers because P2P systems can consist of million of nodes and they are dynamic in nature. So simulation for such a large dynamic network is difficult due to technical constraints even on the most powerful machines. In this paper we focus on survey and comparison of different P2P simulators by taking some important criteria viz., architecture, usability, scalability, programming language support and overlay supports into consideration.