CIS 451, Fall 2003. Projects. Every student will be involved in a project. Projects are done in teams of either 1 or 2 students. Teams of 2 are recommended. This semester ``paper studies'' are permitted. Mr Statica gave me a couple of possible topics: 1. Emergency Response Network Systems (911 systems, Military, Medical, NORAD, etc). 2. The race for Bandwidth. Demand vs capacity for today's and future networks. 3. Satellite based military & civilian communication networks. 4. Cellular Telephony Networks. 5. Dynamic Flow Distribution in Communication Networks (for minimum delay routing). 6. Artificial Neural Networks and their role in military applications. 7. Artificial neural networks used in military targeting systems with automatic target acquisition & understanding. 8. Technical design and requirements of an ISP. 9. Routing on the Internet (Software and Hardware). 10. Cyber-warfare & E-Penetration: How to Protect Computer Networks against them. 11. Secure communications using cryptography: Modern Encryption methods. 12. Steganography and image filtering: transmission of secret messages embedded in video and data transmissions. 13. The role of the shortest path and minimum spanning tree in communication networks. 14. Load Balancers & computer clustering for better wen service performance. 15. E-Z pass network: A technical review. 16. Cable TV Network: A technical review. 17. B2B and B2C secure internet transactions. 18. Multimedia communications and video conferencing systems. 19. Wireless network design & implementation. 20. The telephone system: a technical review. 21. Computer networks used in remote medicine: present and future trends. 22. IP telephony, Voice over IP (VoIP) systems. 23. Design and implementation of a home-based family network. (For example a computer network, a security system, a home automation system, etc.) You can propose your own project. Send me a title and a 1 - 2 page outline of what you plan to do. One student may do a technical project on VoIP. I have VoIP over H.323 in my lab. He may implement VoIP over SIP. (See Tanenbaum p 685 etc). This is not the same as 22 above. 22 above would be a paper study. For example a market analysis, or a study of how much money is spent on VoIP, or the impact of VoIP on on ``old fashioned'' circuit switched telephony, etc. Students planning to do a ``paper study'' of VoIP: See the New York Times of Sunday 10/12/2003. There is an article that features (among other items) a company called Skype that sells software for VoIP between ``private people''. (You and your friend in Australia both buy the software, install it in your workstations or PCs, then talk using VoIP). One student will do a technical project in the Internet Laboratory. He will study (by measurement, for TCP) the relationship between delay (Round Trip Time) and packet loss probability and throughput. To find out more about a topic, you can use google. For example, for 23 I did a search on ``computer home network''. I found several promising entrees. One is ``http://computer.howstuffworks.com/home-network.htm''. For 22 I did a search on ``Voice over IP'', and got MANY pointers. If you want to write a project paper on one of the topics above, and you know nothing of the topic, start with google. Another possibility is amazon.com . I went to amazon.com to find books on telephony. Interesting: Most books seem to be on or related to VoIP. But there are a few on ``old fashioned'' telephony. If you want these: write down author and title, and see whether the library has them. Students who want to know about minimal delay routing in the Internet could go to my web page (Papers) and look at the ``MPLS'' papers. These probably are a bit too technical, but it may give you a start. One of my Bell Labs ex-colleagues mentioned: The following references might be of some use to your students: 1. Syski: Introduction to Congestion Theory in Telephone Systems (1986)- North-Holland 2. BSTJ September 1983, Vol 62, No. 7, Part 3 (Issue on Total Network Data System) (BSTJ stands for Bell System Technical Journal). My feeling is that that book, and that paper, are too hard for this course. But feel free to spend 20 minutes with each, I will be delighted to be proven wrong. Another ex-colleague recommended the book Gerald R. Ash, ``Dynamic Routing in Telecommunications Networks'' for students who want to do a project on routing in telephony etc. I have similar misgivings about that book. But I have not read it. (Most of it was written after I stopped doing research on routing). So maybe it is easier than I guessed based on knowing the author and his previous work. Try it for 20 minutes and please prove me wrong. ---- I strongly prefer projects that involve programming. After all, we ARE a College of Computing Sciences. Ms Kanigiluppai is writing a simulation (``event driven Monte Carlo simulation'') of a simple ``go-back-n'' protocol. See Tanenbaum p 216 etc. The code of the simulation hopefully will appear on this website soon. Monday 10/13 ? Parts of the code that students need to understand will be discussed in class on Tuesday 10/14. A ``minimal'' project would be to use the simulation to study the relationship between Propagation Delay, Serialization Delay, Window, packet loss probability, probability of failing the checksum, etc, and throughput. Required are results (plots, graphs, etc) and a discussion of the results. A great project would be to use the simulation and modify it, for example to model a Selective Repeat protocol. The simulation above is NOT the one described by Tanenbaum (p 220 etc). That simulation will not be discussed in class. Students are not expected to study or use Tanenbaum's simulation. Because writing the simulation got delayed, you have time until 10/21 to choose a partner and tell me what project you want to do. If it is a topic not in the list above, I need a short proposal (1 - 2 pages) EARLIER: by 10/17. Projects will be due November 21. (three weeks before final exam).