Section: New Software and Platforms
YALPS
Keywords: Traffic-shaping - Nat traversal - Experimentation - Peer-to-peer - Simulator - Deployment
Functional Description
YALPS is an open-source Java library designed to facilitate the development, deployment, and testing of distributed applications. Applications written using YALPS can be run both in simulation and in real-world mode without changing a line of code or even recompiling the sources. A simple change in a configuration file will load the application in the proper environment. A number of features make YALPS useful both for the design and evaluation of research prototypes and for the development of applications to be released to the public. Specifically, YALPS makes it possible to run the same application as a simulation or in a real deployment. Applications communicate by means of application-defined messages which are then routed either through UDP/TCP or through YALPS’s simulation infrastructure. In both cases, YALPS’s communication layer offers features for testing and evaluating distributed protocols and applications. Communication channels can be tuned to incorporate message losses or to constrain their outgoing bandwidth. Finally, YALPS includes facilities to support operation in the presence of NATs and firewalls using relaying and NAT-traversal techniques. The implementation of YALPS includes approximately 16K lines of code, and is used in several projects by ASAP, including HEAP, P2P-AllYours, and Behave.