Design and Implementation Aspects of a Novel Java P2P Simulator with GUI

Peer-to-peer networks consist of thousands or millions of nodes that might join and leave arbitrarily. The evaluation of new protocols in real environments is many times practically impossible, especially at design and testing stages. The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation aspects of a new Java based P2P simulator that has been developed to support scalability in the evaluation of such P2P dynamic environments. Evolving the functionality presented by previous solutions, the authors provide a friendly graphical user interface through which the high-level theoretic researcher/designer of a P2P system can easily construct an overlay with the desirable number of nodes and evaluate its operations using a number of key distributions.