Project for Capacity Planning


Graduate students only in Capacity Planning are required to complete a project. On this page are some topics to "get you started". I am open to new project ideas.


The project is expected to be something significant. The final deliverable must be in standard conference paper format. An example of a project from Spring 2001 is rogers.pdf. This paper will appear in the IEEE LCN conference in November 2001. This conference has a 50% acceptance rate. A template for a standard IEEE format paper is sample.pdf and in "source code form"... sample.doc. You must exactly follow this format.

The first deliverable is a one page proposal (due on 09/13) containing:

  1. A description of the problem
  2. A description of how the problem will be solved
  3. At least five references relevant to the proposed project

Possible topics include...

  1. It is difficult to make one-way delay measurements in the Internet. There are a lot of two-way (i.e., round-trip time) delay studies, but few of one-way delays. For this project you are to develop a simple tool that sends time-stamped packets via UDP to a "catcher" program. The catcher program writes the send and receive times of each received packet to a file. Once the tool is written, you are to deploy the tool between two distant sites and collect several days of measurements. You are finally to investigate correlation between one-way and two-way delays.

  2. Video traffic is expected to continue to increase in volume on packet networks. What does "video cam" traffic look like? What are its characteristics for packet size and interarrival time? For this project you are to install at least two different video cams and trace the generated network traffic. Then you are to characterize the collected traffic traces.

  3. I have a trace of 5 million packets collected from the USF backbone. From this trace I built an empirical distribution for generating packet lengths. This first order models assumes that there is no correlation between packet lengths. Is this a correct assumption? You are to explore packet length characteristics in this trace file, and other traces. You are to come-up with a simple packet length model that is better than the first order empirical distribution model.

  4. The ping tool measures delay. Can you come-up with a tool that measures (or estimates) bandwidth? Here is a simple (and well known) method. Send two back to back packets as a "ping". Then, measure the gap between the packets on their return. Some thinking should have you see that this gap will be caused by lower bandwidth links that the originating sending link. From this gap you can estimate the bandwidth of the slowest link in the path.

  5. The ping tool sends out pings periodically (deterministically). However, a Poisson view (PASTA = Poisson Arrivals See Time Averages) may give a more accurate (or "real") view of RTT. Modify a ping program to have exponentially distributed interarrival times and then compare your and existing ping for a number of paths. Is there are difference in mean RTT? If there is, how can we test which answer is "correct"?
Last updated by Ken Christensen on AUGUST 23, 2001