Projects

Project Ideas:
 
Here are brief descriptions of some class project ideas. Most of the ideas below have been proposed by a "mentor". If any of the ideas below sound interesting, more detailed information will be provided by the project "mentor". Students are also welcome to propose their own project ideas.
 
Note that, as discussed in class and mentioned on the class Web page, a project proposal will be required in both cases, i.e., whether students are using one of the proposed ideas below or proposing their own. Project proposal guidelines are described below.
 
1. TCP uses the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) method inorder to estimate the round-trip time (RTT), the time between sending a segment and receiving an ACK from the other end. Estimating the RTT accurately is critical for TCP's performance. The work reported in B. Nunes, K. Veenstra, W. Ballenthin, S. Lukin, and K. Obraczka, "A machine learning framework for TCP round-trip time estimation", EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2014,
2014:47, doi:10.1186/1687-1499-2014-47 proposes a machine-learning approach based on the Fixed-Share Experts technique to improve the accuracy of TCP's RTT estimation. In this project, you will use the ns-3 network simulator to reproduce the results presented in the Nunes et al. paper.
 
2. A similar approach to the one described above can be used to estimate TCP's retransmission timeout (RTO), i.e., the interval of
time the TCP sender will wait for a segment's acknowledgment from the TCP receiver before timing out and retransmitting the segment. Currently the computation of the RTO is based on TCP's estimate of the RTT. In this project, you will use the ns-3 network
simulator to evaluate the performance of TCP when using the Fixed-Share Experts technique to estimate the RTO.
 
3. Based on the paper: S. Mansfield, K. Veenstra and K. Obraczka, “TerrainLOS: An Outdoor Propagation Model for Realistic Sensor Network Simulation”, In Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society’s MASCOTS, 2016, extend TerrainLOS to incorporate more realistic channel propagation models.
 
4. Port the model described in the paper S. Mansfield, K. Veenstra and K. Obraczka, “TerrainLOS: An Outdoor Propagation Model for Realistic Sensor Network Simulation”, In Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society’s MASCOTS, 2016, to the ns-3 network simulator.
 
5. Use the connectivity model proposed in the paper S. Mansfield, K. Veenstra and K. Obraczka, “TerrainLOS: An Outdoor Propagation Model or Realistic Sensor Network Simulation”, In Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society’s MASCOTS, 2016, which takes into account terrain to decide whether nodes are connected, to reproduce results from a paper describing a well-known routing protocol in multi-hop wireless networks.
 
6. Based on the paper Shesha Sreenivasamurthy and Katia Obraczka, “Clustering for Load Balancing and Energy Efficiency in IoT Applications”, in IEEE MASCOTS 2018 and its extended version (in preparation), port the proposed clustering approach to the new version of Cooja-Contiki and reproduce the expriments reported on the papers.
 
7. Based on the paper Danielle L. Ferreira , Cláudio de Souza, Katia Obraczka, and Carlos Alberto V. Campos, "Identifying User Communities Using Deep Learning and Its Application to Opportunistic Networking", to appear at the IEEE MASS 2019, modify the DACCOR protocol to support multipoint delivery.
 
8. Based on the paper Danielle L. Ferreira , Cláudio de Souza, Katia Obraczka, and Carlos Alberto V. Campos, "Identifying User Communities Using Deep Learning and Its Application to Opportunistic Networking", to appear at the IEEE MASS 2019, modify the DACCOR protocol to account for node mobility when making decisions on how to forward messages.
 
9. Project ideas on cloud and datacenter networking:
Given the list of papers below, pick one and try to reproduce its experiments and results. Alternatively, propose a variant of the solution proposed to address any limitation/shortcoming of the proposed approach. Here's the list of papers:
 
 
10. Other project ideas: in general, you can propose to reproduce results reported on a paper we read in class or paper(s) referenced by papers we covered.
 
Project Proposal:
 
A project proposal must be submitted by all students by e-mail to the instructor and TA. As mentioned in class, the project proposal must contain the following information: (1) Project topic (title); (2) Brief motivation and description of related work; (3) Proposed approach; (4) Experimental methodology; (5) Demo plan and/or expected results; (6) Timeline with milestones.
 
The project proposal is due by the end of the 3rd week of class. The project proposal is not graded but it is required so students can get feedback on the project they selected and how they plan to carry it out. There is no stipulated format for the project proposal. It could be a pdf file as an e-mail attachment or plain text in the body of the e-mail message.

 

Project Due Date and Deliverables:

Project deliverables include a project report, project presentation, and well-documented source code. All deliverables are to be submitted on Canvas by Dec 10, 11:59pm.

The project report should be written as a technical paper that could potentially be submitted to a conference. Either IEEE or ACM paper style can be used to format the report, which should be self-contained, i.e., it should have all the information needed for a reader to understand it without having to look for information elsewhere (e.g., other papers). The report should contain: introduction/motivation, related work, technical approach, implementation, evaluation methodology, results, lessons learned, future work, conclusion. Maximum 10 pages and minimum of 5 pages. As a guideline, conference papers typically vary between 6 to 10 pages.

The project presentation should follow a similar structure/organization but needs to be more concise since project presentations will be 12-min long (with Q&A). Note that a general guideline for dimensioning the slide deck for a presentation is to allow 2-3 minutes per slide.