Paper review: <End-to-End Packet Delay and Loss Behavior in the Internet [Bol93]>

Reviewer: <Ryan Gehl>

1. State the problem the paper is trying to solve.

This paper is trying to use "ping" technology to understand the packet delay and loss behavior of the internet.

2. State the main contribution of the paper: solving a new problem, proposing a new algorithm, or presenting a new evaluation (analysis). If a new problem, why was the problem important? Is the problem still important today? Will the problem be important tomorrow?  If a new algorithm or new evaluation (analysis), what are the improvements over previous algorithms or evaluations? How do they come up with the new algorithm or evaluation? 

The main contribution of this paper is that it attempts to identify the structure of the Internet by underderstanding the paket delay and loss behavior. With this understanding, people can design better network algorithms (routing and flow control) as well as use this knowledge in designing video and audio applications.

3. Summarize the (at most) 3 key main ideas (each in 1 sentence.) 

(1) Their unique method of analysis involves sending small UDP probe packets (ping) at regular time intervals. (2) Other studies in this field use analytic, simulation, and experimental approaches to analyze the Internet. (3) Probe packets are lost randomly except when the Internet traffic intensity is very high.

4. Critique the main contribution
   • Rate the significance of the paper on a scale of 5 (breakthrough), 4 (significant contribution), 3 (modest contribution), 2 (incremental contribution), 1 (no contribution or negative contribution). Explain your rating in a sentence or two.

   I would give this paper a rating of 3 because the topic has already been studies but the results are still interesting.

   • Rate how convincing the methodology is: how do the authors justify the solution approach or evaluation? Do the authors use arguments, analyses, experiments, simulations, or a combination of them? Do the claims and conclusions follow from the arguments, analyses or experiments? Are the assumptions realistic (at the time of the research)? Are the assumptions still valid today? Are the experiments well designed? Are there different experiments that would be more convincing? Are there other alternatives the authors should have considered? (And, of course, is the paper free of methodological errors.)

   By including an explaination of previous research in this field, I feel that the authors have shown that they understand the field of research and are confident that their approach is a worthy addition to the literature in the field.

   • What is the most important limitation of the approach?

   The biggest limitation is that the source host and the destination host are the same (in order to account for local clock differences).

5. What lessons should researchers and builders take away from this work. What (if any) questions does this work leave open?

Sometimes a relatively simple tool for probing a research question can be used to generate some very interesting results.

This work could be extended such that the source and the destination are not the same. In this way (assuming local clocks are synchronized), it may be possible to identify specific bottlenecks.