# Systematic Evaluation of LibreSocial--A Peer-To-Peer Framework for Online Social Networks
## 1 Introduction
Most of the P2P-based OSNs incorporate mechanisms give users the ability to control their own privacy settings and also maintain data ownership, which drastically reduces or completely eliminates the pressure to monetize. Also, since the current OSNs are Web 2.0 applications and are at a logical level inherently P2P in nature [13], it is more sensible to couple the logical level with an actual physical level that is P2P in nature. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been in existence for quite some time, with a notable upsurge in research in this field at the turn of the millennium. P2P systems distinguish themselves from other computing paradigms by the fact that participating units (peers) have equal rights within the system, regardless of their computing capacities. Simply put, a P2P network or system is a virtual, self-organized network formed over the existing physical communication network through introduction of specialized protocols that enable the heterogeneous nodes to autonomously interact with each other and share resources. P2P networks are characterized as having high degree of decentralization, self-organization, multiple administrative domains, low barrier to deployment, organic growth, resilience to faults and attacks and abundance and diversity of resources [14; 15]. However, the design and implementation of P2P OSNs is not trivial, requiring considerations into key P2P aspects such as the topology design, distributed data storage, update propagation and versioning, search and addressing, robustness under churn and security [13]. The research on P2P OSNs has given rise to many proposals such as PeerSoN [16], Safebook [17], SuperNova [18], DECENT [19], LotusNet [20] and DiDuSoNet [21], each using different techniques to solve these design challenges. For most of the proposed solutions, the observed focus reported is on showing how the system achieves a particular function vis-a-vis an identified design concern, such as security, privacy, storage, replication and so on. Therefore there is little, if any, literature showing a realistic assessment of the quality these OSNs in terms of the overall performance against the associated costs. In this paper, we aim at presenting a systematic evaluation of the performance of one of the more advanced P2P OSN solutions, LibreSocial [22] (previously called LifeSocial.KOM [23; 24; 25]) which is currently undergoing iterative development. We note that the existing publications on the previous iterations of LibreSocial were not focused on showing how well the system performs in general, but rather on its design [23; 24] and the security features [25]. Specifically, we aim at showing the general system performance by evaluating the application comprehensively to show the degree of availability, scalability and robustness. The rest of the paper is arranged as follows. Section 2 introduces the benchmarking as an experimental methodology that can be used for P2P systems and also describes the system quality properties that we aim to investigate. In Section 3, we briefly give a description of LibreSocial, our P2P-based OSN framework solution. Thereafter, Section 4 introduces the metrics that will be employed in evaluating the system, and further describes the test setup, including the test scenarios and the different workload specifications. Section 5 shows the results obtained with a discussion that interprets them. Finally, in Section 6, we give the concluding remarks.