A few days ago I stumbled across a video online that I uploaded more than 10 years ago, showing the software I developed for my degree thesis in action.
This software, written in Java in AnyLogic, was designed to simulate how a P2P network works. It could dynamically generate a network with a given number of nodes (in the video, for example, there were 500) and connect them to each other based on a “proximity” logic. Each node simulated a PC in a P2P network, so it could request files from the network to download and, in turn, share its own files.
“Good” and “bad” nodes were dynamically added to the network. The former behaved in a healthy way for the network and exchanged “clean” files. The latter, on the other hand, behaved “badly” and deliberately slipped malicious files in among their own.
The goal of the project was to simulate how a P2P network could protect itself and isolate malicious nodes using algorithms based on node ranking.
Here is the video of the simulation:
Watching this video brings a little tear to my eye…more than 10 years have already gone by…