Project Plan

Each student will choose to either write a survey paper on a topic of his/her choice, or conduct an implementation/simulation research project and write a short report describing it. The students who choose the research project will be more leniently graded. The students will give brief presentations on their survey papers or projects. Students can choose to work alone or in teams of 2-3.

A preliminary project plan will count for 10% of your final grade. It is due September 27th, 2000, in class. If you are working in a group, one project plan is to be submitted for the entire group.

The project plan consists of the following five sections:

Topic (one sentence)
What is the main topic of your research or survey paper? See Project Topics for suggestions.

Goals and Methodology (one page)
What are your goals from the study?
What are the main contributions of your work?
Furthermore, if you are conducting a research/simulation/implementation project, describe your methodology, e.g., 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 algorithms? are you implementing a previously described system? In all these cases, what are the metrics you are interested in measuring to evaluate the system/algorithm?
If you are writing a survey paper, discuss the type and scope of the paper, e.g., is it a paper that compares several algorithms based on a set of metrics? is it a summary of recent developments in a certain field?

Tentative Outline (one to two pages)
What are the sections and subsections of your research/survey paper?

Annotated Bibliography (three to ten pages)
What are the primary papers/RFCs/Internet drafts you are planning to include in your survey, or use as a basis of your research? Include a two sentence description of what each references contains and why it is relevant to your project. Also mark the most important 2 or 3 references on which you will base your work.

Milestones and Deliverables (one page)
What tasks do you plan to complete? When do you expect to complete them by? What are you submitting with your report (complete code, code patches, data files for graphs and tables, etc)?