Each student will choose to either (i) write a survey paper on a topic of their choice, or (ii) conduct a research project and write a short report describing it. All students will give brief presentations on their survey papers or research projects during the last few weeks of the semester. Students can choose to work alone or in teams of 2 or 3. I will consider the type of project and the number of team members when grading.

A project plan is due by 8 PM on February 10th, 2022. If you are working in a group, a single project plan is to be submitted for the entire group.

The project plan consists of:

1. Title
What is the main topic of your research or survey paper? See below for suggestions. I am also open to new topics you suggest.

2. Problem, Motivation, and Methodology (two to three pages)
Describe what you plan to do, why, and how.
For example, try to address some of the following questions.
What is the problem you will solve, and what are your goals?
Why do you believe your work will be interesting and unique?
What will be the main contribution of your work?
How can we assess if you have partially/fully succeeded?

If you are conducting a design/measurement/simulation/emulation/implementation project, describe your methodology. For example, are you designing a new system/algorithm, or are you analyzing the performance of a previously developed algorithm/system, or are you simulating one or more algorithms, or are you comparing the performance of several existing algorithms/systems, or are you implementing a previously described algorithm/system? What do you plan to measure to evaluate the system/algorithm, and what parameters do you plan to vary in your experiments? What results do you expect?

If you are writing a survey paper, discuss the type and scope of the paper. For example, are you writing a paper that analyzes and compares several techniques/algorithms based on a set of criteria? if so, what are these criteria and why did you select them?

3. Related Work and References (no restriction on number of pages)
What are the primary papers/documents you are planning to include in your survey, or use as the primary basis of your research, and why are they relevant? Discuss them as in a "Related Work" section and a reference section of a research paper, e.g., section 7 and the references section (pages 28/29 or 12/13 of PDF) of this example.

Project Types

• Experiments, e.g., using an emulator like Mininet or a simulator like OMNET++ or ns-3
• Analysis of traffic traces or other datasets (and possibly reverse engineering services)
• Taxonomies and surveys

Project Topics

• Understanding differences between video, virtual reality, and augmented reality
• Understanding differences between live, stored, and interactive video streaming
• Understanding traffic characteristics of today's multimedia applications
• Understanding congestion control for multimedia
• Understanding multimedia caching
• ........... Any other topic we agree upon!

See the links at the first bullet on this page for some tips.

The final project report is due by 8 PM on May 4th, 2022.

Here are reports from student projects in previous offerings of CS 638 and CS 536: Analyzing Video Services in Web 2.0: A Global Perspective (2008) and Optimistic Load Balancing in a Distributed Virtual Environment (2006)