This assignment is due at 5:00pm on April 22nd and will be graded by your TA and your CI instructor. Submit your write-up and worksheet via our submission site.

For the third critique, your job is to evaluate and assess RON, building on the analysis skills developed in the first and second critiques. The associated worksheet walks you through the process of analyzing the system described in "Resilient Overlay Networks".

After filling in the worksheet, use the following guidelines to organize your analysis into a 2-3 page critique of RON. Your critique should take the form of a standalone document modeled in part after a technical feasibility study. Your audience is a community of peers who have not read the paper.

Keep in mind that the design goals listed on the worksheet -- simplicity, scalability, etc. -- may not be the only important goals of the system. You should consider them in your critique, but there may be other design goals mentioned in the paper that are just as important; include those too!

While reading, consider whether you agree with the claims that the paper makes. If the authors claim that a particular design goal is met, do you agree? What evidence do the authors give to support their claims, and is it enough? Include this analysis as part of your critique.

Before beginning to write, think about how you might organize your critique. You might assess each module in turn, or each design goal. You might order design goals by importance (e. g. most to least important) or by strength (strongest to weakest—or the reverse!) Use your introduction to forecast and your conclusion to recap. The critique should be approximately 750-900 words. Remember that your assignment must paraphrase information from the paper; you cannot simply re-use sentences from the RON paper.

• Introduction presents the system and prepares readers for the paper
  • Briefly summarizes how the system works.
  • Identifies the priorities or design principles.
• Body of the paper presents your analysis of the system
  • Explains which design goals are significant to the system and how they are handled. This may include simplicity, scalability, fault- tolerance, and security and other system-specific goals.
  • If any common design goals are not significant to the system, explains why.
  • Addresses any other important limitations or successes of the system
  • Uses evidence from the text (use citation and/or section references) to support each claim; you need not cite lectures.
• Conclusion summarizes the system and its key advantages and disadvantages
  • May respond to or re-connect to the introduction

Submit your write-up and worksheet using our submission site. We will not be grading the worksheet; we just want to see how you used it as preparation, so that we can make future iterations of the worksheet as helpful as possible.

Again, this assignment is due at 5:00pm on April 22nd, not 11:59pm.

Questions or comments regarding 6.033? If you are a student, please post on Piazza. If not, send e-mail to the 6.033 staff at 6.033-staff at mit.edu.

6.033 home //