CS 268 Semester Project
Project Teams and (Tentative) Project Titles
- Ashwin Mathew, Ozan Demirlioglu, Matthias Goerner: "Constrained Routing to National Boundaries"
[pdf]
Winner, Best Project Graphic Award
- Isaac Liu, Man-Kit Leung, Dai Bui: "Using the Internet for Real-time Control"
[ppt]
- Shoaib Kamil: "Datacenter Optical Interconnects"
[pdf]
- Ari Rabkin, Andy Konwinski: "Application-Network Cross Layer Tracing and Correlation"
[ppt]
- Benjamin Hindman, Stephen Dawson-Haggerty: "Rethinking Wireless Network Transport and Mobility"
[ppt]
- Barret Rhoden, David Zhu: "Evaluation of Click Software Router on Multicore Processors"
[pdf]
- Ashima Atul, Beth Trushkowsky, Peter Alvaro, Akhil Dhar: "Declarative Networking"
[ppt]
Winner, Best Project Title Award
- Junda Liu, Yanpei Chen: "Datacenter Transport Protocol Design and Performance"
[ppt]
- Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Kurtis Heimerl, Matei Zaharia: "Multi-network Mobility"
[ppt]
- David Zats, "Routing in Sensor Networks"
[pdf]
The Essential Five Questions That Any Project Proposal Should Answer (The Heilmeier "Catechism")
- What is the problem you are trying to solve?
- What is the state-of-the-art and where does it fall short?
- What is your initial approach?
- What resources do you need for success?
- What is your rough timeline of work?
Project Schedule
- F, 19 September: Initial project proposal meetings with the instructor
- Th, 25 September: Short In-class Project Proposal Presentations
Single Quad Chart (Example: [ppt]
[pdf])
- Northwest Quadrant: Project Graphic, Project Name, Project Team Members
- Northeast Quadrant: What is the research contribution of the project? Bullet points on the new and interesting concepts to be investigated in the project.
- Southwest Quadrant: Why do we care if you are successful? Bullet points on the potential impact of the project.
- Southeast Quadrant: Project milestones and schedule through the end of the semester.
- F, 10 October: Second round project meetings with the instructor
- Th, 23 October: Checkpoint In-class Project Status Presentations
Revised Quad Chart
- Northwest Quadrant: Project Graphic, Project Name, Project Team Members
- Northeast Quadrant: Revised statement of the goals of the research project: what is its research contribution? Refined bullet points on what is to be investigated in the project.
- Southwest Quadrant: Bullet points on issues resolved and remaining open issues to be addressed.
- Southeast Quadrant: Updated project milestones and schedule through the end of the semester, highlighting accomplishments to date.
- F, 14 November: Third round project meetings with the instructor
- F, 12 December: Project Poster Session, 6th Floor Soda Hall, 12-2 PM
- Provide a short project abstract, 5 - 10 sentences describing the problem addressed by your project and your results, by 5 December 2008. These will be made available on the web site and used in emails to advertise the poster session.
- M, 15 December: Final Project Write-ups due at 1700 hrs
- Projects reports are expected to be 10-20 pages long.
- One person projects are near the shorter end, three person projects the longer.
- A good report must answer the standard questions about any research project. The following format is suggested:
- Abstract: WHAT did you do, WHY was it important, WHAT were your high level results?
- Problem Statement: WHAT is the problem you attempted to solve?
- Prior Work: HOW have others approached your problem, and WHY were they only partially successfully?
- Research Approach: WHAT was your approach to solving your problem? WHAT did you build? WHAT was your experimental methodology in terms of instrumentation, data collection, analysis, etc.? Include figures to describe your architecture and to assist in the presentation of your algorithms and analyses.
- Results: WHAT were your results? HOW did you evaluate your work and WHAT were your figures of merit? Include graphs, charts, or other ways to visually describe your results.
- Lessons Learned and Future Work: If you knew then what you know now, WHAT would you do differently? WHAT questions are left for future research?
- Summary and Conclusions: Summarize your project and place your results in an overall context.
Initial Project Ideas
- Datacenter Networking: Datacenter packet traces are not relatively available, and if they existed, they would benefit a large number of design studies. Collecting such traces is non-trivial. Good application level generators need to be selected, and you need access to a representative datacenter. You can access the Department's R-cluster for experiments, but the number of nodes is only a few dozen. We can arrange for access to Amazon EC2, but this is a virtualized environment, and traffic not visible to the trace collector can impact network behavior. Furthermore, correlating activity sourced from multiple points in the network is a problem. However, being the people who collected such traces could make you famous.
- Datacenter Networking: A frequent application pattern in datacenters is the transmission of a work from one master to many slaves, who perform the request in parallel on partitioned data, communicating results backs to the master. If the service time for the slaves are about the same, then traffic flowing back towards the master can hit a congestion point, and packets could be lost under certain loading conditions. If responses are tightly encoded, then the senders may not be able to recover other than by timeouts. This kind of laggard behavior can significantly affect time to completion for the whole application. One alternative is link layer flow control. Another is to break correlated transmissions by adding randomness into the response time of the senders. It would be interesting to study of the phenomenon of congestion, packet loss, and strategies for dealing with it in datacenter networks.
- Datacenter Networking: Datacenter networks are "fat trees" constructed from commodity Ethernet switches, aggregated switches, and switch/routers at the top of the tree. Crosslinks for redundancy purposes are there, but there aren't many of them. While it is generally believed that the network enjoys low levels of utilization and is rarely a bottleneck, higher outdegrees as the datacenter grows could cause some problems for the higher level switches. The revered computer design Chuck Thacker has proposed an alternative datacenter interconnection scheme, based on hypercubes, but still using commodity ethernet technology for the internode links (1 G, 10 G, 40 G). These multicomputer interconnects, widely studied in the late 1980s, yield higher cross-section bandwidth at the possible cost of a larger number of hops between nodes. This project would involve analyzing these tradeoffs in the context of the communications patterns of typical datacenter applications. This is a good project for a team interested in both architecture and networking.
- X-trace Enabled Routers: George Porter and Rodrigo Fonseca developed X-trace, a framework for using packet paths to collect information about network applications. It would be interesting to be in a position to use the framework below the sockets level inside network elements. This can be done, for example, by extending the CLICK software router to make it X-trace aware. Such an extended router could be useful, for example, to correlate packet streams from multiple sources for collecting whole network traces.
- Multicore Network Processing: Packet inspection and classification, for security, accounting, and quality of service, has often been rejected by the network research community as too expensive (in terms of latency). This project would examine how multicore processors could be used to handle pattern matching applications applied to high throughput network traffic. This is another project that might appeal to students interested in both architecture and networking (Prof. Keutzer in the ParLab is also interested in this topic).
- Multinetwork Interface Power: The following project was suggested to me by Bryan Lyles, a researcher at Bellcore. You have (i) multiple interfaces (wifi, wiMax, 3GPP, ....), (ii) each with different power saving modes, (iii) each with different capabilities in the modes, and (iv) each with different times to move between modes. The goal of the project is to represent power modes in a device independent interface, separate description/mechanism and policy, and enable policy control. Industry is trying to do this in 802.21. The documents can be found at https://mentor.ieee.org/802.21/documents You will probably want to look at: https://mentor.ieee.org/802.21/file/08/21-08-0243-00-mrpm-mrpm-sg-closing-report-july-2008.ppt and https://mentor.ieee.org/802.21/file/08/21-08-0230-01-mrpm-mrpm-redefined-scenarios-presentation.ppt since these contain pointers to a bunch of relevant presentations. We do not have a good methodology for representing the flexibility intrinsic in the various technologies.
- Campus Wireless Wardriving: It would be interesting (at least to me!) to make an extensive catalog of wireless LANs on and around the Berkeley campus, with an eye towards quantifying the interference issues, lost performance, and difficulty of cross-network mobility. For example, if you are authenticated for the EECS wireless LAN and AirBears, why can't we have tool that allows us to seamlessly move between these networks, automatically providing the necessary credentials on our behalf as we move from Soda Hall into the campus area?
- Virtual Machine Networking Support: This is a project that may be of interest to an OS student. There hasn't been much work that I am aware of that tries to manage the physical network interface that is shared among multiple virtual machines to ensure that it is used fairly. For example, can a single VM fill the buffers of the physical network interface, monopolizing its usage and starving other VMs' access to the network? This is a classical kind of research project in that first you would have to assess the fairness of virtual network access to see if it is a problem, propose a solution (perhaps scheduling of buffers), and then showing that your proposal results in improved network performance for the collection of VMs running on the same physical hardware.
- Network Security: While I do not plan on discussing network security issues in this semester's course, I would certainly consider projects in this area. Professors Paxson, Song or Wagner may be able to make some suggestions here. At the recent SIGCOMM Conference, there was an interesting paper about "Googling the Internet," basically using Internet search to uncover information about end nodes of the Internet from the crawled web pages of various management boxes that exist in the network, many of which now come equipped with embedded web servers (that Google manages to find and crawl!). It could be fascinating (and potentially dangerous) to see what vulnerabilities this might reveal.
- Wireless Networking: The car companies are very interested in enabling vehicle-to-vehicle communications, to enable, for example, cooperative collision avoidance systems. As an accident prone driver, I think this is a neat kind of network application that could led to an interesting project after checking some literature. How well do existing 802.11 wireless access point work at high velocities and rapidly converging angles? (Perhaps this is of interest to an EE communications person.) The communications must be reliable, even in the presence of challenging wireless conditions. There are some interesting privacy and security issues here, to make sure that the system can neither be subverted or tricked.
- Always a good idea to look at the last SIGCOMM conference proceeding or NSDI conference proceedings to get some ideas for next step opportunities in the work presented. For example, the last SIGCOMM has several data collection and analysis papers; not every paper proposed a new mechanism and evaluated it. This might suggest some ideas to you to pursue.
Writing Papers
Simulation
Testbeds and Emulation
The RON Testbed
Planetlab
Wireless Nodes
Routing
Measurement
- Scriptroute (note: runs well on planetlab and the RON testbed)
Analysis
- Books: Raj Jain, the Art of Computer Systems Performance
Analysis - a very good overview of lots of mathematical techniques and
queueing bits, aimed at a systems audience
Last updated: Sa Nov 29 17:16:55 PDT 2008