CS276 - PROJECT OVERVIEW

Objective

Deliverables

• 05%: Project Proposal [Nov 13 @ 11:59pm: email to almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu]
• 05%: Preliminary Project Report [Nov 27 @ 11:59pm: email to almeroth@cs]
• 10%: Project Presentation [Nov 28/30: in class]
• 15%: Final Project Report [TBA: email to almeroth@cs]

Project Proposal

This can be a relatively short (1-2 pages or as necessary) description of what you propose to do. You can submit a longer project proposal if you would like, especially since some of the text can be re-used in the project report. The more details you provide, the more feedback we can give you.

The goal of the project proposal is to make you think hard about what you want to do; do some preliminary background work; and to start to develop some of the details. For Khaled and I, it will be a chance to give you feedback both on (a) whether your project is a good one, and (b) whether what you propose is achievable within the very short period of time left to complete the project. Keep these objectives in mind when writing the proposal. Also keep in mind that we will post all of the project proposals on the course web site.

The project proposal should include three parts. The three parts are what we discussed in class on Oct 10th: Overview, including motivation and briefly what the related work is; Project Idea, which includes as much detail about what you are actually building; and Project Evaluation, which includes a description of how you plan to evaluate your work and show it to be "good" or "better".

Your project proposal should also include any relevant "meta-information", for example, if you are working with team members, include a list of who they are, and generally what responsibilities each will perform. Remember that groups can be 1-3 people. It might also be helpful to include a rough timeline, though this timeline will probably be more valuable for you than it will be for either Khaled or I. Finally, if you have any unusual needs or there are any unusual "risks" that might keep you from completing your project, include those as well.

Preliminary Project Report

One of the most important lessons from this class is that you will find that a good paper and presentation will require much more time than you likely estimate. This is one class that you absolutely do not want to leave either the writing or presentation preparation until the last minute. In looking at the above grade breakdown from above, note that your grade for the project is essentially determined by only the project report and presentation. Demonstrations or follow-up questions will only be used in an "emergency", i.e. if the paper and presentation clearly do not convey the contributions of your project.

Both the preliminary and final project reports should be written using the IEEE Infocom conference submission guidelines. You can find style guides either for Word or for Latex. Only papers in DOC, PS, or PDF formats will be accepted. The page limit for project reports will be 6 pages. Assignments submitted in a format other than this will not be accepted, as is the case if you wanted to submit a paper to Infocom! On October 31st, we will discuss more of the organization of a good Infocom/class project paper.

The reason for submitting a preliminary project report is threefold. First, giving serious thought to the content of the paper before you do your presentation will actually help you improve the organization of your presentation. Second, doing an early version of your project report will help force you to focus on writing the report relatively early. And finally, Khaled and I will do as much as possible to give you feedback about your report before the final version is due.

Again, all preliminary project reports will be posted on the course web site. These will be useful to other students as background for your presentation and in completing Homework #4.

Finally, feel free to "negotiate" with other groups to review their project report if they will review yours. You'll also want to review other reports for good ideas on how to organize your own report.

Project Presentation

The project presentation should generally follow the outline of your paper. The most important factor necessary to plan your presentation will be the length of time you will be allowed. Essentially, we will have 240 minutes maximum for presentations (2 hrs x 2 days). If we have roughly 15 groups, that roughly calculates to approximately 15 minutes total for each presentation. I am hoping there will be slightly fewer groups and so we will have either slightly more time, or slightly less pressure to switch between group presentations. Keep in mind that this time limit will be strictly enforced.

More details and recommendations on presentations will be covered later in the course.

Final Project Report

Final project reports are simply a polished version of the preliminary project report. At this point, there is not a specific due date on the project report. My hope is that we will have the final relatively early during finals week and the project reports will be due no later than mid-week of finals. We will have to see how the scheduling works out.

Project Examples

The list of projects includes:

• Friend Relay (and GUI): Imagine you are in a coffee shop and your friend as a TMobile account, and you do not. Design a protocol and GUI that allows your friend to run a server and allows you to run a client, that together, find each other, and allows the server to act as a relay for packets sent to/from the Internet. A GUI is an important piece so that your friend can monitor who is using his/her connection, for what, and how much bandwidth is being consumed.

• Ping Pass-Through Client/Server: This project has already been fairly widely done. Therefore, a key will be to doing something novel. The idea is that some protected wireless networks still allow ICMP to pass through the access point, even before properly authorizing to use the network. By running a server on a machine at UCSB and a special client on your mobile device, the client can encapsulate all data traffic inside of ping and send it to the server. The server strips off the ICMP headers and delivers the traffic to the intended destination. Of course, some of those headers have to be changed so it comes back to the server for "re-encapsulation" in ICMP. Here, a GUI might be helpful to monitor what is happening, but again, only if time permits. Performance-wise, you could run some experiments to measure the performance tradeoffs and scalability limits.

• Laptop "Lo-Jack" System: The "lo-jack" system is a tracking system for cars that can be activated if the car is stolen. Design such a system for your laptop. The server runs on a non-mobile PC and the client runs on a laptop. Every time the client boots, or more periodically, it signals the server with information about where it is. If the laptop is stolen, when it boots, it may provide useful information about where it is located (assuming the thief is not smart enough to wipe the machine). Beyond just a ping with IP address, there might be additional useful information to collect and send to the server. Again, a system like this for PCs exists, but costs money. Design a better one for free!

• Media-on-Demand Client/Server: This is really just a generic client/server to download/stream/deliver content from a server to a client. One challenge is to try and built a truly interactive client/server that focuses on reducing the delay between when the content is created and when it is played, e.g., a Voice-over-IP client/server that minimizes delay. However, the real challenge here is likely for you to learn how to packetize and stream media. There are obviously numerous commercial tools and the idea has often been given as a class project. So if you choose this idea, you will likely have to work hard to add some real creativity to develop a neat, new, novel system.

• Implement "Coupons" for Mobile Systems: A student of mine and I have done the simulations to see how this kind of system would perform. Now, how about an implementation? The idea is for wandering mobile devices to "infect" each other with "coupons", bits of information or a real coupon transmitted opportunistically as users come into contact with each other. A basic description of the system can be found in the following paper:
  • A. Garyfalos and K. Almeroth, "Coupons: Wide Scale Information Distribution for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks", IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (Globecom) Global Internet and Next Generation Networks Symposium, Dallas, Texas, USA, pp. 1655-1659, December 2004.
• NOTE: This is a five page paper in a format similar to the IEEE Infocom format. It might serve as a good guide for all projects on the scope and amount that you can write in this kind of paper. In some cases, it is better to have a straightforward idea that you can do a good job with, than a brilliant idea that you make very little progress on. Save the brilliant ideas for an independent study project next quarter!

• Intermittent Access Agent: Many Internet users now, once they are online, go through a fixed "set" of sites, finding news, stock quotes, email, bank account status, etc. The way things currently run, the user must access each of these services separately/sequentially over numerous/multiple connections. How would things change if we created an "application layer bundler agent", or a higher level services protocol that would be responsible automatically grabbing all the info required in large "bundles" and delivering it on the local machine in the end? The agent could either act based on some input/request from the user during a setup phase, or be more intelligent and gather that from the machine's local logs (browser history for example) and know what to fetch. This application layer agent, would be even more useful in cases where the network has only intermittent connectivity. (This project will be managed by Khaled, for more details on the project, contact him.)

• Create Your Own Project: Clearly you have the freedom to choose anything you would like to do. If you would like to discuss your ideas with Khaled or I before the project proposal deadline, feel free to do so. In fact, the more creative the better!