Welcome to Hives - A P2P networking and distributed file system simulator

This project was born during the development and writing of a master’s dissertation in Computer Science and Engineering, through a research sponsorship granted by ISR for the participation in the project UID/EEA/50009/2019 - 1801P.00920.1.02 DSOR. ISR is research and development institution affiliated with IST, the university where said dissertation is submitted at.

The project’s work consisted of adapting and optimizing a few algorithms widely used and studied in robotics and control research fields to a P2P scenario where the peers form the basis for a Distributed Backup System. Throughout this process, due to the lack of other viable options, the researchers wrote their own cycle based simulator, and the result was Hives.

Hives is a P2P and general purpose DFS Simulator that facilitates research by allowing developers to prototype distributed networks quickly. We use the simulator to test our Stochastic Swarm Guidance algorithm implementation in a Distributed Backup System setting. The simulator is written in Python (version 3.7.7), which offers users easy access to powerful scientific libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, and Pandas, which are not readily available in languages like Java and as a result of some of the best or most well-known simulators out there.