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TDTS21 Advanced Networking

Scenarios and Project


Project Overview

Last updated 17/1/2022: Note that this is a preliminary project overview and information may be changed in the next week or two (depending on exact number of students taking the course and what topics we decide t work on this year).

The project will be done in groups of 3 (or 4) students, and will include multiple milestone reports and peer reviewing. In total, there will be three milestones (1, 2, 3), a (post) mid-term seminar, a seminar, and a final report deadline that you must meet. You will also be expected to give an oral presentation at the seminars (around the times of milestones 2 and 3, respectively). For each milestone, for the seminar, and for the final project report you are expected to provide peer reviewing and constructive feedback.

Each project has a supervisor, from the teaching staff, who will supervise and evaluate the work of the students in the group.

The project can be of theoretical or practical nature, although at least some practical aspects are expected. In both cases, the final product of the project will be a written report and an oral presentation. Note that the final project should be the result of the work of all students in the group. It is not acceptable that students split the project into two independent sub-projects and work separately. Groups not following this rule will fail the project.

Milestones and deadlines will have to be rigorously followed. Any deviations from the scheduled deadlines should be agreed by the project supervisor.

Expectations: The goal is to produce a report that include publishable results. Your methodology is expected to be sound, clearly explained, and the results are expected to be clearly presented.

You will be given a grade based on your performance on (i) the seminar, (ii) the final report, and (iii) your feedback reports given to other groups. To pass the project you are expected to meet all deadlines and your reports should follow the specifications. When the expected standards are not satisfied, especially with regards to the final report, you may be asked to complement the report with additional work. All deadlines, including a single hard deadline for such additional improvements, are specified below.

Group and Project Assignment

Step 1: Group assignment and registration in WebReg The project will be done in groups of 3 (or 4) students. Please find partners and register with those people on Webreg. There will be two classes of students: students registered in TDTS21 and students registered in the PhD course. I expect that you will work with people in your own peer group.
  • Register here
  • Prelimiary deadline: Feb. 11 (Friday) [AFTER we have discussed all the "selected" papers]
Note: We have two types of projects: (1) MSc/BSc projects and (2) PhD student projects. Please sign up to the correct category. In both cases, it is important that you work as a team, help each other, contribute to the group project, and that you give all team members the opportunity to contribute. Finally, in the case that you fail or have failed the course project (and the rest of your group past), you are expected to do an individual project next time the course is offered. In this case, please email me rather than sign up via webreg.

Step 2: Project proposals: A list of available projects will be published at the following address (prel date: February 14 at 17:00, possibly sooner): https://www.ida.liu.se/~TDTS21/labs/ (remove white space) 2022kLiHtAjwTYfuxNMp/tdts21-projects-2022-v00.pdf

Step 3: Project bidding: Choose the project you (as a group) would like to do. There can be at most two groups per project, in many cases only one group. When choosing the project please take into consideration the possible prerequisites that the projects supervisor has indicated in the project description (e.g. "familiarity with the UNIX environment and basic C programming"). If you select a project for which prerequisites are listed, 2you must explain how you meet the prerequisite (merely stating that you do is not sufficient). Should you select a project for which you do not meet the prerequisites, then your supervisor may cancel your project. Should you be allowed to continue, then be advised that there is a significant risk that you will fail the project.

Select 5 projects in a priority order 1 to 5 (1: highest) Send an email to Niklas Carlsson requesting to be assigned a project. The email must have the following format:


Subject: TDTS21: Request for project

Body:
Group: # (as listed in webreg)
Student 1 (Name and LiU ID)
Student 2 (Name and LiU ID)
Student 3 (Name and LiU ID)

Requested project(s): 
1. Project #: Title (your first choice for project)
2. Project #: Title (your second choice)
3. Project #: Title (your third choice)
4. Project #: Title (your fourth choice)
5. Project #: Title (your fifth choice)

where the Projectxxx is the project id from the list of projects on the web.
Be prepared to make new selections in case all your 5 projects from the wish list become unavailable. You will be contacted by us if this will be the case.
  • Deadline: Feb. 16 (Wednesday)


Step 4: Project assignment: Your emails requesting projects will be handled on a first come first served basis, BUT with any request comming in on or before Feb. 15 (Tuesday) ordered at random. Therefore, please come together as a group and discuss which projects that you would prefer. Each project from the list can be taken by only a specific number of groups (usually one or two).
  • Gr. U1. Ellen (ellro412), August (augca570), Frans (fraoh005), Tzu-Tsen (tzuhs404): "Data collection and analysis of IP address usage of phishing domains (and perhaps also other classes of bad domains)"
  • Gr. U2. Maximilian (maxvo113), Joakim Thorn (joath015), Hampus (hamro777) Niklas (nikka560): "Longitudinal COVID-19 analysis of DNS traffic"
  • Gr. U3: Marco (mapal305) Shiwei (shido949), Yinan (yinwa337): "The social networks of the gaming communities"
  • Gr. U4. Armelle (armco553), Martin (marry564), Maximilian (maxme107): "Does being a stereotype help becoming targeted or is it enough visiting a page?"
  • Gr. PA. Mohammad (mohbo63), Rodrigo (rodsa37), Suleman (sulkh60) "TBD"
  • Gr. PB. Alireza (alimo21), David (davha59), Minh-Ha (lemi44) "TBD"


Reviewer assignment for feedback: For each milestone you will be asked to give feedback on each others reports. Before each milstone, your group will therefore be assigned reviewers. Note that each milestone may or may not have a different feedback groups.
  • Date: TBD (likely: week before each milestone).

Reviewing and Report Guidelines

Peer reviewing: As a reviewer you are expected to (as a group) give feedback on the other groups' project. Such feedback reports are expected to be brief (a few bullets/paragraphs), and focused on things that can help the other group improve their report. These peer reviews should (i) briefly summarize the (proposed or completed) work in your own words, (ii) summarize the main strengths/weaknesses, (iii) make at least one suggestion on how to strengthen the paper, and (iv) identify things that are unclear to the reader. For (i)-(iii) I suggest writing a regular review, and for (iv) I would suggest giving the other group a marked up copy of the report. After the seminar, you are also expected to help the group that you review identify the parts to focus their final report on.

Deliverables (important): For both reports and feedback reports you should create a single email with the report (or feedback report) attached as a pdf file that is addressed to (i) all members of your reviewer group(s), or of the group that you are reviewing, (ii) the instructor, and (iii) all members of you own group. Also, only LiU email addresses should be used for this communication, and all communication should have "TDTS21 project: (insert something here; e.g., Milestone X group A.1)" in the subject heading. The formatting is important to keep track of the projects.
  • For the report you should use the default ACM SIG-proceedings templates, which can be found here.
  • You are expected to use appropriate referencing (see ACM referencing standard) in which you use appropriate and well described references. Please avoid web references (e.g., wikipedia), and instead try to identify books and research papers (published in reputable conference proceedings or journals) for your references.
  • Milestones


    Milestone 1: Introduction
    • You are expected to have written a clear introduction section to your report that clearly define the particular problem that you intend to investigate, clearly motivate the importance of the selected problem, and describe your expected contributions/results. You should also create a time plan for how you plan to investigate the problem and reach this final target.
    • At this point your report should have a title, abstract, and introduction, and a brief initial gameplan.
    • Note 1: In this version of the report, I want you to write as if you are done your project and already have your results. (In other words: Please envsion your final report and write the introduction accordingly.) You can find a nice explenation of how a typical CS introduction may ready here.
    • Note 2: Please check if you can find related research litterature that have looked at similar or related problems. Such papers may help you identify some aspect that you may want to investigate closer.
    • Deadline: Feb. 24 (prel.)
    • Feedback deadline: -- (This year, M1 will only be sent to Niklas)
    Advice on references and citations: Please be consistent in the formatting of your references. As there is no page limit (as with reserach papers), I would suggest being fairly complete. For journals/and magazines I would suggest giving author names, title of the article, the name of the journal, the volume, the number/issue, the year, and the page numbers. For example,
    • G. Dan and N. Carlsson, "Centralized and Distributed Protocols for Tracker-based Dynamic Swarm Management", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), Vol. 21, No. 1 (Feb. 2013), 297--310.
    For conferences I would suggest giving author names, title of the article, the name of the conference proceedings, the place of the conference, the dates of the conference, and the page numbers. For example,
    • Y. Borghol, S. Ardon, N. Carlsson, D. Eager, and A. Mahanti, "The Untold Story of the Clones: Content-agnostic Factors that Impact YouTube Video Popularity", Proc. ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Beijing, China, Aug. 2012, pp. 1186--1194.
    When citing papers, I would suggest that you try to cite the papers such that the sentences makes sense without the citation. For example, "Borghol et al. [2] present an intersting analysis of ..." or "... have presented an interesting analysis of YouTube what makes some videos more popular than others [2]." Please avoid using sentences such as "[2] presents an interesting ..." or "In [2] the authors present an interesting ..."

    For example, the .bib entries for the above paper may look as follows:

    
    @article{DaCa13,
    author = {G. Dan and N. Carlsson}, 
    title = {Centralized and Distributed Protocols for Tracker-based Dynamic Swarm Management}, 
    journal = {IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (IEEE/ACM ToN)}, 
    volume = {21}, 
    number = {1},
    month = {Feb.},
    year = {2013}, 
    pages = {297--310}
    }
    
    @inproceedings{BAC+12,
    author = {Y. Borghol and S. Ardon and N. Carlsson and D. Eager and A. Mahanti},
    title = {The Untold Story of the Clones: Content-agnostic Factors that Impact YouTube Video Popularity},
    booktitle = {Proc. ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)},
    address = {Beijing, China}, 
    month = {Aug.},
    year = {2012}, 
    pages = {1186--1194}
    } 
    

    Request: For paper writing, in your .bib file, please use the following format for references: (i) always use four letter plus two digits, (ii) the numbers should correspond to the year of the published article, (iii) the letters should correspond to the first letters of the author names, such that (iv) a single author paper is referred to as "Firs14", (v) a two author paper is referred to as "FiSe14", (vi) a three author paper is referred to as "FiST14", (vii) a four author paper is referred to as "FSTF14", and (viii) a paper with five or more authors is referred to as "FST+14". For example, the two cases above would be DaCa13 and BAC+12, respectively.


    Milestone 2: Methodology and expected results
    • You are expected to have written a methodology section that clearly describes the tools and methods that you will be using to investigate the selected problem. Your methodology section should describe details of how you plan to evaluate and analyze the performance or system/protocol design of the aspect that you will take a closer look at in your project.
    • You are also expected to write a short summary of your expected results. What are you expecting to find from your analysis? If possible, use this to define a hypothesis (even if it is a known result), which you later can try to validate, show, or debunk. (Based on this, you may also want to revise your preliminary introduction, from last milestone.)
    • Also, please revise the sections from the previous milestone as you see best fit, and based on the feedback from your review groups.
    • At this point your report is expected to be 2-4 pages [has been reduced], have a clear outline, well-written sections, and figures which clearly capture the problem and/or methodology.
    • Deadline: March 4 (prel.)
    • Feedback deadline: March 11 (2 days after mid-term seminar). However, please make sure to read and prepare questions before the mid-term seminar.

    (Early!) Mid-term Seminar: Briefly present the problem and preliminary/planned results
    • You are expected to give a clear presentation in which you present the problem, motivate the importance of the problem, your methodology, and the lessons learned from your investigation.
    • Note that the presentation is very short, so it will be important to be well prepared. It is also important to be ready when it is your turn.
    • Date: March 9
    • Feedback deadline: March 11 (together with feedback on milestone 2).
    • Note: Similar to for the milestones, you are expected to give feedback to the group for which your group's number appears in the "mid-term seminar" column.

    Milestone 3: Preliminary results and conclusions
    • You are expected to have performed a preliminary analysis, simulations, experiments, or whatever methodology that you selected, such as to address the question/problem that you set out to answer. Based on these results and your investigation of the problem (reading literature, for example), you are expected to write a results section in which you present your results, as well as a concise conclusion (that can have some statement about potential future investigation).
    • Also, please revise the section from the previous milestone as you see best fit, and based on the feedback from your review groups.
    • At this point your report is expected to have a clear outline, have well-written sections (e.g., introduction, methodology, results, and conclusions), and have figures which clearly capture the problem, methodology, and key results/findings.
    • Deadline: May 4
    • Feedback deadline: May 6 (remember to bring forward what you think the final report should focus on).

    Seminar: Present the problem and lessons learned
    • You are expected to give a clear presentation in which you present the problem, motivate the importance of the problem, your methodology, and the lessons learned from your investigation.
    • Note that the presentation is short, so it will be important to be well prepared. It is also important to be ready when it is your turn.
    • Date: May 19 (Prel.)
    • Feedback deadline: May 20 (remember to bring forward what you think the final report should focus on).
    • Note: Similar to for the milestones, you are expected to give feedback to the group for which your group's number appears in the "seminar" column.

    Final report: Based on feedback from latest report and seminar
    • You are expected to rewrite the report such as to focus the report on the most important messages and lessons that you have learned about the problem of consideration. The report is still expected to have the similar sections and content as before. However, you will have to improve the writing and presentation (e.g., to say the same thing using less/better text) and focus results towards what you and others found more important/interesting.
    • When you write the final report, please try to use the feedback from both milestone 3 and the seminar to improve your report. It may also be worth thinking about if there are things you described better during the seminar (e.g., using a better figure, different story, different example) than in milestone 3. Is this a better way (e.g., "story", order, or examples) to present things also in the report? If so, perhaps, some parts of the report can be improved ...
    • At this point your condensed report is expected to be in publishable format (with any additional results in a clearly marked appendix), have a clear outline, have well-written sections, and have figures which clearly capture the problem, methodology, and key results/findings.
    • Deadline: May 25
    • Feedback deadline: May 27 (This review should clearly state your general assessment of the report, and if you find the report acceptable or not)

    Preliminary feedback group assignment (2022)

    To find the group(s) that you should send your report to for feedback, please use the table below as follows:
    1. Find your group and group number in the first two columns. This gives you the row that defines to which groups you should send your report for feedback.
    2. For each milestone, identify the group number indicated in the column for that milestones. This is the group (or groups) that you should send you report to for feedback. (Use column one and two to find the names of the group members of that group.) For example, for milesone 2, group U1 should email their report to group U2 (with me and all group members in cc), who will then give feedback to group U1 (with me and all group members in cc).
    3. As with your other reports, for the seminar(s), you should expect feedback from the group specified in the corresponding column. For example, for the final seminar, group U4 should give feedback to group U1. (Note that for each deadline you can use that column and your group id to identify the group(s) for which you should provide feedback.)
    4. Note: I might end up mixing things up for later deadlines (...) including mixing feedback between Ux and Px groups.
    Number Group Milestone 1 Milestone 2 Midterm seminar Milestone 3 Seminar Final project
    U1 Ellen (ellro412), August (augca570), Frans (fraoh005), Tzu-Tsen (tzuhs404) -- U2 U2 U3 U4 U3+U4
    U2 Maximilian (maxvo113), Joakim (joath015), Hampus (hamro777) Niklas (nikka560) -- U3 U3 U4 U1 U4+U1
    U3 Marco (mapal305) Shiwei (shido949), Yinan (yinwa337) -- U4 U4 U1 U2 U1+U2
    U4 Armelle (armco553), Martin (marry564), Maximilian (maxme107) -- U1 U1 U2 U3 U2+U3
    PA Mohammad (mohbo63), Rodrigo (rodsa37), Suleman (sulkh60) -- PB PB PB PB PB
    PB Alireza (alimo21), David (davha59), Minh-Ha (lemi44) -- PA PA PA PA PA

    Seminar Schedule (2022)

    Please see time schedule here.