CS 536 Project Topics (update in progress)
Following is a list of possible project topics for CS 536 (Fall 1997).
The list is not meant to be exhaustive; it provides only a guideline.
Independent project ideas are encouraged.
Three categories of projects can be distinguished: first, the
introduction of an original idea and its exploration; second, implementing
and investigating a nontrivial variation of an existing
algorithm, implementation, or idea; third, survey of a current research
area.
The stringency of ``professionalism'' expected
(i.e., the level of polishedness
of the final report) increases as we go from the first category to the
third.
Care should be taken to choose a scope of work that can be accomplished
within a period and workload specified in Assignment XII.
The final report should be 8-12 pages long, including figures
and references.
Multi-access control
Congestion Control
- Congestion control for reliable transport:
Build a reliable transport mechanism on top of UDP incorporating
congestion control; to be used mainly for file transfers.
Compare performance against TCP-based implementation.
Approaches:
- Rate-, window-based control.
- Link-based control.
- Others.
- Congestion control for real-time multi-media transport:
Build an unreliable transport mechanism on top of UDP incorporating
congestion control; to be used for transfer of real-time voice
and video. The goal is to provide quality of service (QoS)
``guarantees'' (various levels of stringency) in terms of
packet loss rate, end-to-end queueing delay, and their variance
(e.g., jitter).
Approaches:
- Reservation-based control.
- Forward error-correction.
- Others.
- Survey/discussion of congestion control issues in ATM networks:
Classification of congestion control approaches; special problems
arising in B-ISDN systems including ATM; possible solutions and
limitations. New approaches?
Routing
- Routing of multi-media conversations with QoS constraints:
Design/implement a routing algorithm that incooperates QoS
constraints such as end-to-end delay, bandwidth, etc. The goal
is to craft a fast method using the greedy (i.e., ``least-cost path'')
paradigm.
Approaches:
- Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford.
- Others.
- Routing using competitive ratio: Exploration of the
feasibility of implementing practical routing algorithms using
the notion of competitive ratios; evaluation of the
method vis-a-vis shortest path algorithms.
Quality of service provision
- Fair queueing and QoS: Implement an efficient scheme for
weighted fair queueing. Demonstrate its performance with
respect to facilitating various levels of QoS for
traffic streams tagged by different priority numbers.
Issues:
- Queue management.
- Multi-dimensional QoS vectors (e.g., packet loss rate,
queueing delay, etc.).
- Admission control and traffic shaping: If a new
conversation with a certain QoS requirement is to be admitted,
determine whether the QoS requirements can be met; also,
upon admission, police individual traffic flow by
administering traffic shaping.
Approaches:
- Route set-up and bandwidth reservation (e.g., RSVP).
- Leaky bucket.
- Others.
Traffic characterization
Transparent distributed services/computing
Network tools
- RTT estimation: Design new schemes for round-trip time
estimation and its use in timeout selection. Characterize
the distribution of RTTs.
- Inference of network topology/state: Use packet probing
to infer the topology of a network and its state including
link delay, effective bandwidth, and their variance.