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1. Project Timeline:

   • Weeks 2 and 3:
     • Tue, 09/13: Proposal Presentation
     • Tue, 09/20: Proposal Due

   • Week 7:
     • Tue, 10/20: Prototype Presentation and Report Due

   • Weeks 14 & 15:
     • Thu, 12/08: Final Presentation Due
     • Tue, 12/13: Final Report Due and Poster Session

   We will use the first two weeks' discussion hours to help you refine your project ideas and to form teams. We will use subsequent discussion hours to discuss your progress and to resolve any issues you may have.

2. Project Grading

   You can consult the Project Ideas below, but are highly encouraged to define your own topic of interest.

   Report format: To make it easier for me to carry around, read, and comment on your reports, please use 11-point size, single column, 1.5 or double spaced, with at least 1" margins on all sides, and printed double sided. There is no page limit requirement, use as many or as few pages as you need, but be concise in your wordings, don't make me read long rambling prose. Proof read your reports for editorial errors such as typoes, grammatical errors, and run-on and incomplete sentences (most often seen in hastily written report done the night before it's due). Reports with editorial errors will be graded "Unsatisfactory."

   A Project Proposal is due the third week of the semester. Each team is required to give a 5-min presentation of its project proposal. The project proposal is a form of contract between team members and a grading guideline. It should contain:

   1. List of team members (if you plan to work on your own, come talk to me first).
   2. Your team's weekly meeting time.
   3. A description and scope of the project.
   4. A list of project tasks and members working on each task
   5. A project schedule with milestones Gantt chart. You can draw a Gantt chart either using a simple drawing tool, a spreadsheet program, a specialize Gantt chart app such as GannProject, SmartDraw, Edraw Max, or a web-based tool such as Gantter, Tom's Planner, Creately's, or others.
   6. A grading scale for the project, i.e. what constitutes a C, B, A, etc.

   If you want to do a joint project with another course, past or present, or as part of your directed study or research work, you must first get permission from the other instructor or your research advisor and you must include in your proposal which part of your project is for which course.

   Submit your proposal in both hard copy and online formats. Turn in the hard copy (a 4-up (4 slide/page) presentation printout is acceptable) at the start of class on the due date. Submit same online on Canvas any time on the due date.

   A Project Prototype is due around the middle of the semester. If you are implementing or re-implementing an algorithm, protocol, or tool, I expect a working prototype by mid term. If you are doing a performance study, I expect an initial collection of traces and set of analysis scripts by the same time. Each team is expected to present a 10-minute midterm prototype presentation. Where applicable, these are the things I expect to see submitted as part of your midterm prototype:

   1. Your project proposal with my markup.
   2. Your prototype presentation (both 4-up hard copy and online).
   3. An online copy of your code or analysis scripts uploaded to the course's Canvas Assignments page.
   4. A draft of your final project report (in both hard copy and online, see below for an outline of the report contents), including:
      1. Any proposed changes to the "team contract" as embodied in the project proposal: milestones, schedule, and/or grading scale (for my consideration and approval).
      2. An initial set of data showing the correctness of your code.
      3. Experimental setup: how you will evaluate the performance of your project.
      4. An initial set of performance figures.
   Final Presentation, Report, and Demo are due the last week of class. Please turn in a hard copy of your final presentation (4-up) and report in addition to submitting them online. The following should be part of your final report:
   1. Your project contract and midterm report draft with my markup.
   2. Your final project report consisting of:
      1. Problem motivation.
      2. Design goals or performance questions.
      3. Design architecture or performance metrics.
      4. Description of code or scripts: major data structures and control flows.
      5. Description of difficulties in coding or performance measurement and analysis: whether, why, and how the original goals, architecture, and/or metrics needed to be changed.
      6. Data showing the correctness of implementation.
      7. Description of your experimental setup to evaluate the performance of your implementation.
      8. Performance evaluation data and analysis showing (non-)achievement of goals.
      9. Future work.
      10. Related work and references.
   3. A 20-min presentation of your final report and, if applicable, an optional 10-min demo.
   4. An online copy of your code or analysis scripts uploaded to the course Canvas Assignments page.

   Poster Session gives you a chance to show off your work to the campus community at large. I will stop by your poster to collect your final project report, ask you questions about your work, and listen to how well you answer questions by others. What goes onto your poster could simply be a selection of your final presentation slides laid out, with additional material from your final report. The department has easels and poster boards (40"x60") you can borrow. If you have a demo, you can also give your demo during the poster session.

3. Project Ideas:

   To see topics that are currently "hot" in a computer-related research community, scan through the latest proceedings of the conferences and workshops of the community. For computer networks largely defined, check out:
   • ACM SIGCOMM, such as the SIGCOMM conference, IMC, CoNEXT, Hotnets, etc.
   • ACM SIGMM for multimedia related networking topics.
   • USENIX conferences and workshops such as NSDI, NDSS, OSDI, HotCloud, etc.
   • IEEE Infocom
   • ACM SIGMETRICS where analytical performance studies of networks can be found.
   • ACM SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops.
   • WWW Conferences
   • For security related research, check out also IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy (Oakland Conference) and ACM CCS.
   • For more distributed systems topics, check out IEEE ICDCS, ACM PODC, etc.

   For your course project, it is perfectly fine to try to reproduce published research. You could view several such projects completed by students in the Stanford's graduate-level computer networks course.