Project Types

1. Analysis of traces (I can point you to how to obtain different traces)
2. Implementation and simple experiments
3. Simulations/comparisons using ns-2, SSFNet, or other network simulators
4. Measurements on the PlanetLab wide-area testbed and analysis of the results (I can help you obtain a slice)
5. Experiments on the Emulab or DETER testbed and analysis of the results (I can help you obtain an account)
6. Mathematical modeling and analysis

Project Topics

• System or traffic measurements and characterization, e.g., comparing different systems, or how the same system behaves with different parameters or at different times, or reverse engineering a system and characterizing its traffic patterns
• Internet topology generation or topology visualization tools
• Quantifying the impact of the Internet topology or routing protocol policies on performance or security
• Topology or performance inference techniques: comparisons or applications for routing and congestion control
• IP telephony: implementation or measurements
• Application-level multicast or other overlays: comparisons or scalability
• Quantifying buffer requirements
• TCP-friendly congestion control: implementation or measurements
• Instrumentation and data visualization tools for network testbed experiments
• Wireless networks: measurements or new adaptation techniques
• ............... Any other topic we agree upon!

Here are some sample projects from the latest semesters of CS 536 and CS 638 offerings

Mohit Saxena, Umang Sharan, Sonia Fahmy, "Analyzing Video Services in Web 2.0: A Global Perspective," In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), 6 pp., May 2008.

• Dimitrios Koutsonikolas, Jagadeesh Dyaberi, Prashant Garimella, Sonia Fahmy, Y. Charlie Hu, "On TCP Throughput and Window Size in a Multihop Wireless Network Testbed," In Proceedings of the Second ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and CHaracterization (WiNTECH), in conjunction with ACM MobiCom, 8 pp., September 2007.
• Roman Chertov and Sonia Fahmy, "Optimistic Load Balancing in a Distributed Virtual Environment," In Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), pp. 74-79, May 2006.
• Rongmei Zhang, Chunqiang Tang, Y. Charlie Hu, Sonia Fahmy, and Xiaojun Lin, "Impact of the Inaccuracy of Distance Prediction Algorithms on Internet Applications- An Analytical and Comparative Study," In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM (the conference on computer communications), 12 pp., April 2006.
• And there are others under submission, and many which continued without my involvement and became part of an MS thesis or PhD dissertation.....
• Here are some more sample project titles from previous semesters:
  • Analyzing Peer-to-Peer Streaming Internet TV: The PPStream System
  • Performance of BitTorrent under High Latency
  • Performance of Concurrent Torrents
  • Application Level Broadcast: Trees or Meshes?
  • Gossip-based Aggregation with Byzantine Failures
  • MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks for Object Detection
  • TCP Timestamp Analysis for Network Fingerprinting: Is it Practical?
  • Implementation, Measurement, and Flood Control in the IRC Protocol
  • Dynamics of BGP Selective Prefix Announcement
  • Remote Active Queue Management

Students can choose to work alone or in teams of 2-3 (if you would like to form a team of more than 3 members, please discuss it with me first). I will consider the number of members of the team when grading project proposals and reports.

The project proposal is due Sunday, September 30th, 2007 by 11:59 PM. If you are working in a group, only one proposal is to be submitted for the entire group.

The final project report (in the form of a research paper including references, and possibly a software demonstration) is due on Monday, December 10th, 2007 by 8:59 AM.

Please e-mail your proposal and then your report as PDF attachments to fahmy@cs. (No MS Word documents, please.)

The project proposal consists of just two parts:

I. Problem, Goals, and Methodology (two to five pages)
Format this like a research paper. Make sure to at least answer all the following questions within your text. Do not include the text of the questions within your writeup, but make sure your writeup will contain the answers.
What is the problem you will address, and what are your goals from the study?
Why do you believe your work will be interesting or unique?
What will be the main contributions of your work?
How will you know if you partially/fully succeeded?

What is the research methodology you will follow? For example, are you designing a new system/algorithm? are you analyzing the performance of a previously developed system? are you simulating one or more algorithms? are you comparing the performance of several techniques/algorithms? are you implementing a previously described system? In all these cases, what are the metrics you plan to measure to evaluate the system/algorithm, and what parameters do you plan to vary in your experiments? What is the hypothesis you are trying to validate with each of your experiments?

II. Annotated Bibliography (two to five pages)
You can either format this as a "related work" section and bibliography, or include annotations within the bibliography itself:
What are the primary papers/RFCs/Internet drafts you are planning to use as a basis of your project? Include a one-two sentence description of what each reference contains, and why it is relevant to your project.

See "Useful Links" for links to some simulation, implementation and measurements tools, and useful manuals and hints that can help with your project.

Please let me know as soon as you can if you will need an account on PlanetLab, Emulab, etc, or if you need any special equipment or software.

Also see Collected advice on research and writing for advice on writing and speaking, and some very funny articles, and Writing Technical Articles for more helpful hints on writing your paper/report.