Note that this information is old and does not reflect the current class. All project related postings for the current class is available on Blackboard.

CSE 570 Course Project

Ground Rules

• Two students per project. Three students team is acceptable; but more comprehensive work will be expected (naturally). Going solo is also acceptable; but not recommended. It usually means a lot of work for the individual to complete a reasonable project. 
• Your goal should be developing an idea to solve a problem, and evaluating your idea. Most common method of evaluation is via simulation. But sometimes analytical methods or experiments are appropriate. Evaluating existing techniques (e.g., comparative evaluation of existing techniques to solve a specific problem) can also make good projects. You should read of a lot of papers related to your project topic and attempt to discover better/more comprehensive solutions/approaches/studies than may exist in literature. 
•  The project report should resemble a paper. There is no specific page limit or format requirements. The best projects are likely to result in actual conference/workshop papers, possibly with some additional follow-up work later. This should be your goal.
• It is expected that each project will be presented in a 15 min presentation in class. We will come up with a presentation schedule later. If results are not available at the time of presentation, the presentation should focus on the background, concept, design, related published work, etc. Here, your goal will be to educate others about your work. If there are too many projects than we have time for, we will either pick only certain projects to be presented, or use a poster session.  
• The project grade will be based on the difficulty/depth of the problem you are trying to solve, your accomplishments/progress on solving the problem, and your report/presentation. This means that an easy problem will require a very comprehensive work, while less complete work will be acceptable for a challenging problem. If you are able to come up with a new and promising idea, even initial work will be appreciated. Basically, you are do not easily win by choosing an easy problem.  
• To make sure that you are actually working on the project at a steady pace, we will have checkpoints. The checkpoints are not mandatory, and are only meant to give you feedback. But if you receive poor feedback on checkpoints, you should take it seriously. Though checkpoints are not mandatory, experience has shown that those who do not submit checkpoints, receive poor grades in the final submission. Checkpoint reports also help you with the final report as you can reuse much of the text you have already written. Checkpoints should be emailed with subject header "Checkpoint n: CSE570," where n is 1 or 2.
  • Checkpoint 1: Due XXX. Submit a 0.5-1 page document describing describing the broad idea of your project with appropriate references.
  • Checkpoint 2: Due XXX. Submit a 2-2.5 page document describing a detailed set of goals and an initial design of your project. This should contain enough details to convince us that you have a good set of plans for a successful project, and you have a focus. For example, it should contain a high-level description of the techniques/algorithms, choice of evaluation mechanisms/platforms etc, probably some initial experiments/results.

Project Ideas

We have ideas here that you can use as starting points. Note that the ideas as stated may be broad-based or vague or incomplete or too complex. It is your responsibility to pick an idea or part of an idea and make it somewhat concrete. It is acceptable to have more than one team working on the same broad idea. We are sure that you will all have different approaches. You are also encouraged to work on your own idea that is not in the list.  For most ideas we have one or more references to get you started. But many of them may have more substantial literature.

Layer 3 and Up

• Geographic Multicast: How would you use geographic routing to perform multicast? How much is the performance advantage relative to traditional methods? [Some ideas are presented in this Secon 06 paper or in this Position Based Multicast Routing paper.]
• Efficient Content Caching/Access in Vehicular Networks:  Imagine content access from cars. Most of the content is expected to be similar for the cars that are in the neighborhood. For example, the content could be maps, weather, location-based ads etc. Using cellular networks for content access (using a cellular data link in the car) could be expensive. On the other hand, it is possible to distribute such content using a combination of caching and ad hoc network routing. The idea is basically that only some cars download content using cellular links. Content is cached. Other cars access such content using 802.11-based ad hoc networks. All cars do carry both 802.11 and cellular data interfaces. However, to reduce cost, the cellular links are used only sparingly. Design and evaluate an efficient (i.e., low latency) scheme for such networks that optimize the use of cellular links. Your position should be that of a service provider that specializes in providing low cost network connectivity to cars and in turn contracts cellular links from a cellular provider and pays a per bit usage cost to this provider. [Reference: Bin Tang's work in WINGS Lab web page.]

Layer 2 and Below

• Bad fish problem: In traditional CSMA protocol (such as in 802.11) all nodes get an equal chance to access the radio medium. Thus, nodes with slower bit rate may get an unfair share of the bandwidth as they take a longer time to transmit a packet. These nodes could be those with already poor links  (e.g., too far from the AP.) Characterize this problem and suggest solutions. Solutions can range from fixing the 802.11 protocol itself (ideal) to deploying practical solutions. [Reference: This Infocom03 paper.] 
• Misbehavior in the MAC layer: Characterize the misbehaviors that are possible in the 802.11 MAC layer that can either give the misbehaving node unfair (as defined by the 802.11 protocol) share of the network bandwidth or can launch a denial of service attack in an extreme case. Suggest and evaluate approaches to detect such misbehaviors. [Reference: Nitin Vaidya's work in UIUC and Jean-Pierre Hubaux's work in EPFL (Domino protocol). Utpal Paul's work in WINGS Lab web page.]
• MAC layer (reliable) multicast: How would you do multicast in the MAC layer? Using simply broadcast may not be a good idea as typical broadcasts are not reliable, as there is no acknowledgement. This is important as broadcasts may suffer from the hidden terminal problem. What is the performance impact of the reliability mechanism? [Reference: Mario Gerla's work in UCLA. Shweta Jain's work on WINGS lab web page. The DirCast work in MSR ]
• Power control/Carrier sense threshold/Rate control in CSMA protocol: One or more of these three parameters can be controlled (statically/dynamically) to optimize performance. You can use the 802.11 protocol or a simpler variation and study the impact of controlling one or more of these on performance, and may be devise strategies or protocols to control these. [Reference: Nitin Vaidya and his students' work (UIUC).  Also look at Jennifer Hou (UIUC) and her students' work].
• Channelization for High Speed Wireless Networks: If the data rate of the wireless network increases, packet transmission times become shorter. However, as carrier sense and propagation time overheads do not change with data rate, these overheads look relatively larger, thus reducing the efficiency of the network. If you consider your homework 2, the net effect of this would be slots remain the same, but packet size (in slots) is small. The options to tackle this problem is to increase packet size (coalescing packets - used in 802.11n) or using multichannel. In multichannel, the available bandwidth is split into multiple smaller channels and transmissions concurrently happen in all these channels. Smaller channels mean that packet size (in slots) are now larger.  You can understand this problem via simulations and address via channelization. [Reference: This paper in Sigcomm10 describes and addresses the core problem using multiple channels.]
• Localize Roadside WiFi AP from Wardriving Data: We have a large amount of sniffed WiFi traces collected in the course of this paper. Note that much of the trace corresponds to repeated drives on the same roads. Localize the WiFi APs seen in this trace. You can try a few methods and evaluate the difference between them. For example, you can localize an AP at the centriod of all the locations you have heard beacons from this AP. Based on the localization lecture, you may be able to do better by incorporating the signal strength and may be a propagation model. (Contact Pralhad Deshpande for the trace. You will need to develop a pretty good idea of 802.11 frame types and formats to make sense of the trace.)

The following are primarily experimental/systems projects. These usually work better if you have some background on related systems or have a hacker attitude. I can help with hardware. Because of limitation of available hardware, I will have to limit such groups to only a few.

• SINR modeling on sensor motes: Experimentally develop a model for bit/packer error rate vs. SINR on the motes platform. You need to learn how to work with motes and TinyOS. [References: Similar work has been done by Bhaskar Krishnamachari (USC) in SECON05 and Sensys06, but using a different hardware than what we have. Ritesh Maheshwari in WINGS lab will help].
• WiFi Traffic Analysis: Collect WiFi traffic via snooping in a busy environment. Analyze the data. Comment on performance. Are there performance issues? Any interesting observations? Multiple concurrent snoopers will make the work more interesting. [Reference: Elizabeth Belding-Royer's work (UC-Santa Barbara) in IMC 05 and IMC07. David Kotz's (Dartmouth) work in MobiCom02 and Mobicom04. Also, Ratul Mahajan's (Microsoft Research) work in Sigcomm06].