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Department of Information Technology

Term Papers

The Task

Write a term paper on any of the suggested topics. The paper should be based on scientfic papers published in the selected area. It is up to you to find and evaluate which papers to choose. You will be working in groups of two students, or for a few selected topics in groups of four students. Choose a topic that interests you and that you feel would be fun to write about.

For the examination you will oppose another group's paper. This means that you also will have to study the area that is the topic of the defending group's paper. You will be expected to give constructive criticism and comments. You will suggest improvements to the paper and stimulate discussions on the topic. However, the point is not to grade the defending group's paper, to mark it or to comment on the language used.

The scope of the paper is about a weeks work. You will work as a team and it is necessary that all group members participate in all stages of the work. Dividing the work is not allowed, for example, that one member writes the paper and another acts as an opponent to another group's work.

The purpose of the term paper is to:

  • exercise your information retreival skills, based on scientific journals and papers
  • summarize, evaluate and present material from these sources
  • gain experience in working together in groups and to constructively review other peoples' work

For information in Swedish, see the old course web page http://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/datakom2/V04/?pg=report

Paper Writing

The style of the paper can be different depending on the approach. Two common approaches are:

  • Survey paper - survey an area of interest. Study and compare different strategies, methods or implementations of protocols or systems. An example could be to survey the area of peer to peer filesharing networks.
  • Detailed study - Study and area of interest in depth. For example, web caching strategies in Squid. Try to write in detail about something specific instead of writing overviews of many different things.

It is important that you present your own ideas and thoughts in the paper. Discuss different approaches or solutions. Try to motivate your opinions by referencing work that supports your view.

IT students should base their papers on at least three different papers in the selected area. For groups consisting of four students at least eight papers are needed. Papers should be between 10-15 pages (10 points, double spaced, including figures) for two authors and 15-25 pages for four authors.

DV/MN students should base their papers on at least six different papers in the selected area. For groups consisting of four students at least 16 papers are needed. Papers should be between 15-20 pages (10 points, double spaced, including figures) for two authors and 25-30 pages for four authors.

Papers should contain a short abstract consisting of at most 150 words, describing the content of your paper. Study the structure of the papers you are reading and try to apply the principles used there to your own paper. At the end of the paper there should be a list of references. It is recommended that you write your paper in a typesetting language like LaTeX http://www.latex-project.org/, which is the de-facto standard for journal and conference papers. Please do not use Microsoft Word unless completely unavoidable since it does not enforce strict formatting and thus makes reading many different documents with different document styles quite exhausting.

The following journals are suitable for people at a level of Master's degree:

  • IEEE Communications Magazine
  • IEEE Network
  • IEEE Internetworking
  • IEEE Computer
  • IEEE Concurrency
  • ACM Computing Surveys

More advanced journals:

  • ACM Mobile Networks and Applications
  • IEEE Transactions on Communications
  • IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication
  • ACM Wireless Networks
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
  • ACM Operating Systems Review
  • ACM Computer Communication Review

Conferences

  • SIGCOMM
  • MobiCom
  • Infocom
  • Protocols for High Speed Networks
  • High Performance Networking
  • HotNets
  • IPTPS
  • NSDI
  • ICNP
  • SOSP
  • OSDI
  • ICCC
  • GlobeCom

Good places to find conference proceedings and journal papers are through the IEEE or ACM digital libraries http://www.acm.org (you have access to it from within the university), the conference web sites or by searching on citeseer or google. The most common journals can also be found in the Beurling library.

Presentation

You should prepare a ten minute long presentation of your paper. Remember that you are the expert in the area you have studied. However, the audience usually are not experts. Try to present your material in a pedagogical way. If you use slides, do not overload them with information. Stay focused on the important issues of your work.

Opposition

You are not required to do a written opposition, but it is recommended that you write down your key issues. After your presentation you will be given ten minutes for your opposition presentation.

You should point out and explain which related work you believe was left out of the defending groups paper (if any). Discuss the approach and relevance of the topics in the paper.

Topics

Select one of the topics listed below. If you want to write about something else, please contact a person responsible for the course. If you do not have a partner to work with, then book the topic you are interested in and announce that you are looking for a partner.

Topics - Groups of Four Students

Active Networking
Delay-tolerant networks
Pricing architectures for the Internet

Topics - Groups of Two Students

Network Co-ordinate Systems
Anonymity and personal integrity on the Internet
Worms and viruses
Merging IP telephony with POTS
High-speed traffic classification
Peer-to-Peer Television
Forensic networking - Internet as a crime scene
Botnets
The anatomy of a successful worm
How to break the Internet
A taxonomy of DHT technologies
Comparing two firewall architectures
Comparing streaming media players
Comparison between SSL and IPSEC
Comparison of TCP SACK, Reno and Westwood
Differences between cHTML, XML, XHTML and WML
Establishing trust in bluetooth ad hoc networks
Hierarchical WEB caching strategies
High-speed TCP
Inter-planetary networking
Interactive distributed games
Key handling in very large secure open groups
Models for electronic money
New architectures for e-mail systems
Payment systems on the Internet
Analysis of Skype

Updated  2005-04-12 11:39:57 by Erik Nordström.