Reviewer: Ritun Patney
Date: 9-13-2007
How would you rate this paper, relative to others we have read? top 25%, but not top 10%
How would you rate your knowledge of the topic of this paper? novice
What problem or issue does the paper address? Why is it important?
The problem addressed is network congestion. Its important for fair and efficient use of available capacity.
What are the main contributions of the paper and why are they important?
Proposes a new view of congestion control. Rather than focussing on fair queuing at routers and limiting TCP to revise its transmission rate based on losses, delay, it focuses on fair dropping at routers and letting the end users transmit at their maximum capacity while employing erasure coding.
How significant are these contributions relative to previous work?
Give detailed comments justifying your view of the paper.
Positives: 1. Claims to have improved fairness and efficiency at reduced complexity. 2. Capacity is used as soon as it becomes available due to terminals transmiting at the maximum link speed at most times. 3. Sending rate not sensitive to packet losses. 4. Packet losses are less important due to coding. Negatives: 1. No results for claims. 2. Overhead associated with coding and packet duplication. 3. Control packets not addressed appropriately. 4. Overlay routing not implementable over this. 5. Diagnosing the network is difficult as its always congested. 6. Need to study the effect of terminals using different coding schemes. 7. Deployment might not be easy. 8. How to implement priority schemes. 9. Impact on MAC layer needs to be studied. 10. Might be hard to differentiate a flooding attack from normal traffic. 11. Can it support a mix of end terminals employing this scheme and those not employing this?