Paper #: Week 3 Paper 2
Title: Designing a Super Peer Network.

(1) Problems
This paper is a good overview on super peer networks. It discusses in nice detail the characteristics of Super Peer networks, their strengths, the performance tradeoffs and then the authors also suggest guidelines for designing an efficient super peer network. The problems of heterogenous clients being a part of the network and creating performance bottlenecks and the inefficiency of the flooding algorithm (as in Gnutella like systems) are the main problems that Super Peer Networks solve in general.


(2) New Idea and Strengths
i) The paper is very well written. It gives a very comprehensive overview of the Super Peer Network. Sufficient background of why super peer networks make sense is given followed by
lengthy discussions on each of their rules of thumb supported by experimental results. Then the authors talk about what a good design for efficient super peer networks should cover.
ii) The k-redundancy design for super peers is a nice design and the authors prove through experimental results that it gives better results.
iii) The rules of thumb are smartly thought and researched about. A couple of them are counter intuitive but supported well by experimental results.
iv) The local decision section is also important. They list out a few, well thought out rules for super peer networks to work efficiently globally when the local decisions are correctly taken.

(3) Weaknesses and Extensions
i) Though the paper is very well written I think sufficient information is not given on how super peers are chosen. The exact criteria and the algorithm for choosing the super peers is not discussed. This is a very integral part of the system and can be a good extension for the system.
ii) The authors limit their discussion to k=2 for k-redundancy. Results with a few more k values might be interesting to go through.
All in all, it is a very good paper with few weeknesses and because it is an overview not too many extensions could be thought about.



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