Paper review: Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-weight Sessions and Application Level Framing

Reviewer: Jason Oh

1. This paper introduces Scalable Reliable Multicast (SRM), a reliable multicast framework for lightweight sessions and application-level framing.
2. The main contribution of this paper is introducing the SRM framework. It improves on the existing IP multicast group delivery model as well as the application-level framing protocol model. This problem is still important today because a strong framework for multicasting still hasn't been adopted despite the inherent benefits of multicasting. The authors develop their framework by building on the concepts begun in application level framing (ALF) and light-weight sessions (LWS).
3. "One size fits all" protocols are inherently weak because a single multicast delivery scheme cannot simultaneously meet the functionality, scalability, and efficiency requirements of all applications.
4. I think this paper approaches a 5 in contribution because it introduces a novel framework for multicasting that still follows the core design principles of TCP/IP.
5. The methodology of the authors is quite convincing. The authors discuss general issues related to their topic (reliable multicast delivery), then go on to introduce their new solution complete with performance analysis and simulation results. The authors describe the applications of their framework to multicasting compared to related work, and then tie in future work and existing problems.
6. Since the authors discuss only the wb application, the development of other applications on the SRM framework remains open for future development. Also, the authors mention the development of an object-oriented SRM toolkit as their area of continued work.