Project

Deliverables:

1. Project proposal - A one page document describing the problem, objectives, methods, plan, schedule, and expected outcomes. Your proposal should contain about 5 references (the references may be listed on a second page).

2. Project paper - You will submit your project in a 5-page IEEE conference style paper. The submitted paper must comply with IEEE conference paper formatting rules. Author instructions from the IEEE are here. A paper that I and several colleagues wrote for ICC 2004 is here. You are welcome to use my paper as a format model or template. Any paper that does not conform with the formatting rules will be discarded (this is exactly what happens to incorrectly formatted conference submissions!).

3. Project demo and source code - You will also demonstrate your project and submit source code (as "open source" for free use by others).

Rules:

1. You may work in student pairs or alone.

2. All submitted source code must comply with the Christensen C style guidelines. Code that does comply to these guidelines will be discarded. All programs must be implemented in straight C (yes, some of the projects could probably be better done in Perl) and must compile with the Borland bcc32 command-line compiler. All programs must be console-mode (no GUI - unless otherwise described below). All programs must be portable between Windows and Unix unless there is some good reason (which you should discuss with me) that this cannot be accomplished.

3. The submitted paper must comply with IEEE conference paper formatting rules. This is discussed in the above section.

4. Plagiarism cannot be tolerated. If you have any questions on this important issue, please see me. Plagiarism will result in you being removed from the graduate program!

Project ideas:

• Idea #1 - Compare the performance of programs written in Java, C, and Perl. You need to define the parameters of interest and implement test programs in each language. You also need to determine the best ways to measure performance and this may include directly instrumenting your programs. Of particular interest is the use of these languages on handheld devices (PDAs, mobile phones, etc.), however you may conduct the study on desktop computers if you have no access to a handheld device.

• Idea #2 - Investigate methods for generating self-similar traffic suitable for input to a simulation simulation model. Develop and evaluate several methods of generating self-similar traffic. A good traffic generator should be simple to understand, efficient to execute, and allow "dialing in" of the Hurst parameter (i.e., the Hurst parameter is the control variable). Some examples of very simple synthetic traffic generators can be found here.

• Idea #3 - A lot of work has been done on characterizing digital video (MPEG, etc.) transmission on IP networks. What about Voice over IP (VoIP)? For this project idea you would collect traces from real VoIP telephones, characterize the traffic, and develop/evaluate a traffic generator suitable for use in a simulation model. If VoIP traffic entirely constant bit rate, then this project is "too easy" And should not be done! There exist free VoIP phones for use with your PC, for example Skype.

• Idea #4 - Very high speed links (e.g., 1-Gbps Ethernet links to the desktop) are frequently idle or run at a very low utilization. This is a waste of electricity (the electricity required to keep the link at 1-Gbps instead of a lower-power 10 or 100-Mbps). It would be interesting to characterize traffic from Ethernet-connected PCs and see if predictive methods of increasing/decreasing link speed could be implemented that would 1) result in electricity savings and 2) not be noticeable by the user. You would likely need to build a simulation model to evaluate your predictive methods. Please see Chamara Gunaratne (one of my PhD students) to discuss this project. You would work with Chamara and your contributions would be duly cited in any publications.

• Idea #5 - An iterative solver for P and Q matrices is here. The input is a text file. Can you develop a visual editor and front end for this solver that allows one to visually draw a Markov chain (that is the input to the solver) and also view the results visually?

• Idea #6 - It is well known that slow start in TCP can contribute to poor performance in transfer of small files across a large/fast network. This can affect web surfing. Can you isolate the effect of slow start and propose an improvement based on a cookie storing the previous maximum rate between a client and server (and then starting the connection at a window size corresponding to the cookied rate)? This is a systems project -- you will have to "hack" this into Linux and then measure/evaluate it.

• Idea #7 - It is well know that the congestion control mechanism in TCP can result in a sawtooth pattern in throughput. Can you isolate (i.e., actually find) this behavior in the lab? If so, I have some very simple ideas (essentially, a stateful window sizing) for improving TCP congestion control that you could "hack" into Linux and then measure/evaluate.

• Idea #8 - A good approach to learning both a problem area and a toolkit is to reproduce an already published result. You are welcome to find a paper and reproduce the key results. Be sure (i.e., in the proposal) to get approval from me before you begin work on reproducing a particular paper. An example of reproducing a paper result is here. If was in reproducing this result that I started the tools page.

• Idea #9 - Can you find a clean/easy way to use CSIM to model arbitrary topologies of queues (both open and closed queueing networks)? The model would read some sort of "configuration file" where the topology is described in terms of a connection matrix, the parameters for each node are described in a list, and traffic input and routing rules are also described. You would validate your approach for simple topologies using Jackson's Theorem. NOTE: If you choose this project, you must learn CSIM well before we cover it in class!

• Idea #10 - Can you find a clean/easy way to use CSIM to model P2P networks (modeling the network topology is very important). See Graciela Perera (one of my PhD students) to discuss the project. You would work with Graciela and your contributions would be duly cited in any publications. NOTE: If you choose this project, you must learn CSIM well before we cover it in class!

• Idea #11 - There is no project idea #11 -- you are very welcome to propose your own performance evaluation project. Perhaps you have a real system at work you want to model? Perhaps your thesis or dissertation research requires a performance model? Please see me to discuss your ideas.