Reviewer: Christoph Jechlitschek
Date: 10-20-2005
How would you rate this paper, relative to others we have read? top 25%, but not top 10%
How would you rate your kowledge of the topic of this paper? familiar, but not expert
What problem or issue does the paper address? Why is it important?
The paper presents a tool to discover the topology of an ethernet broadcast domain without assistance from network switches. In detail, it can discover hubs, switches, and computers connected to them. The targeted area of use are small networks at home or small businesses that use inexpensive network components which do not understand SNMP. This tool will help to speed up the detection of certain problems.
What are the main contributions of the paper and why are they important?
The main contribution is the method of infering a topology just by observing their own traffic. In addition the correctness of their method was proved.
How significant are these contributions relative to previous work?
I'm not too familiar with previous work, but it looks to me that other topology discover programs rely heavily on SNMP since it is a good information source. The fact that this program works without SNMP is a significient contribution.
Give detailed comments justifying your view of the paper.
This paper proposes something new that might actually have an impact (might be used). The method used is clearly described and well explained with examples. I could not see any weak points. If the daemon code is really incorporated in standard Windows and Linux distributions it might become a viable tool like traceroute