Project

The semester-long project is an open-ended research project. Project topics are of your choice but should be related to topics covered in the course, mainly routing and content delivery on the Internet. Projects should be done in groups of two (or three with permission of the instructor). Some projects with involve analyzing either existing or new measurements. For some possible project ideas, please register for the course page on Piazza and look at the first week slides.

Project Timeline

9/18: Post your project group in Piazza
10/2: Post your project proposal (single column, 2 pages at most)
10/30-11/6: Mid-semester project status meetings with instructor
12/4 (Last day of class): In-class project presentations
12/14: Email me your project report and put on Piazza. Put your code in dropbox
12/16: Post review of a different group's project report on Piazza.

Writing Papers

Papers must be written in LaTeX. Papers must be no longer than 6 pages, EXCLUDING references. Text should be formatted in two columns on 8.5-inch by 11-inch paper using 10 point fonts on 12 point (single-spaced) leading, and 1-inch margins. You should strongly consider using some type of version control software (e.g., Subversion or Git) for your project and the paper you write describing it.

Resources

The following resources may be helpful:

Planetlab

PlanetLab is a large-scale, distributed collection of machines that can be used for experiments and measurements. It has around 600 nodes scattered over about 350 sites. The machines run something linux-ish that you can login to and run programs, and there exist a variety of utilities for automatically distributing software to the nodes, running programs, and so on.

You must sign up to use a PlanetLab account. Please only sign up if you're going to use the account, since it imposes some management overhead on people not involved with the course.

Amazon EC2

We may be able to get credits from Amazon or other cloud services if you want to do a cloud-based project. Contact me if you need credits to run experiments in Amazon.

Transit Portal

I help administer a BGP testbed that you can use: the Transit Portal.