SRM

This describes Scalable, Reliable, Multicast. It uses some naming and ack tricks to get basic functionality, then they implement a whiteboard app with it.

Ok, so nothing tricky. They pointed out that Multicast doesn't fit with end to end, which is obvious enough to have been a brilliant observation. I now want to write a paper on end (to end)^n just so that it exists. It's a good point that I don't think I've entirely digested. In the overlay, you just create n^2 connections, each end-to-end. Are these equivalent? The notion of fate-sharing was what they used to differentiate the two. This is tricky, and I'm not in the right place to reason through this correctly.

There's a somewhat tangential interesting point there. Multicast is equivalent to many unicasts. If you buy the hirearchy, you can implement all of this above that. This is probably why multicast doesn't matter that much. With that, we get to keep end-to-end and the existing routing infrastructure, at the loss of performance for a very small set of applications.

Either way, they pretty much implemented bittorrent in the paper filler, explaining possible uses of multicast with caching. That's when you know it's an important work: something like a "future work" section creates an industry.

Overall, I probably don't have much to say here. It's not too surprising how they did this, and that they punted the ordering stuff to a higher layer.