CS262B Reading Summary

MACEDON: Methodology for Automatically Creating, Evaluating, and DEsigning Overlay Networks

Adolfo Rodriguez et al.

Summary by Feng Zhou
4/18/04

Strong points of the paper:

Macedon is a overlay network toolbit much needed by the network research community. As the paper notes, it enables easy implementation and fair evaluation of existing and new overlay network algorithms. The key highlight of the Macedon design is the high-level domain specific language used to specify the overlay network protocol. The domain specific language captures the similar data structures, basic algorithms and communication primitives utilized by various overlay networks. Compared to the normaly library approach, this is higher-level and more descriptive. It brings the size of a typical DHT specification to a few hundred lines of code, which is impressive. It also has the potential of preventing implementation errors and providing static checking ability.

One major flaw,
The evaluation part does provide a persuasive study of why Macedon provides a fair and consistent evaluation framework for overlay networks. Only one experiment with SplitStream is done.