TDDE35 Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Networks

Scenarios and Project

Project Overview

The project will be done in groups of approximately 4 students, and will include semi-weekly reports and peer reviewing. In total, there will be three milestones (1, 2, 3) and a final report deadline that you must meet. You will also be expected to give an oral presentation at the semimar (between milestone 3 and the final report). For each milestone, for the seminar, and for the final project report you are expected to provide peer reviewing and constructive feedback to each other.

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

Expectations and Bonus Points

You will be given an unofficial project 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.

Potential bonuses towards TEN2 (June same term as project): Your project (PRA1) can earn you bonus marks towards the TEN2 exam. Such potential bonuses will be based on your unofficial project grade.

You can only obtain bonus marks towards the exam based on the status of the project at the time of the original deadline; typically not through complementing work. Such higher grade can earn you up-to 8 bonus marks for this year's original TEN2 exam (June the year you do the project). Note that bonus marks are only valid for the exam this term!! (To give a reference point, a project deemed representative of a grade 3 will earn you approximately 2 bonus marks, a project deemed representative of a grade 4 will earn you approximately 4 bonus marks, and a pr8oject deemed representative of a grade 5 will earn you approximately 6-8 marks. Some intermediate bonus marks may be used to distinguish particularly strong projects from borderline projects.)

You cannot save bonus marks for later. Furthermore, at most 2 bonus marks can be used towards a grade 3 on TEN2, at most 4 bonus marks can be used towards a grade 4 on TEN2, and at most 8 bonus marks can be used towards a grade 5 on TEN2.

Group and Project Assignment

• Register here
• Deadline: March 28 (Thursday), 2024

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

Subject: TDDE35: Request for project (Group #)

Body:
Group: # (as listed in webreg)
Student 1: Name and LiU ID
Student 2: Name and LiU ID
Student 3: Name and LiU ID
Student 4: 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 Project # is the project id from the list of projects on the web.

• Deadline: 16:00 on April 4 (Thursday), but priority if before 20:00 on April 3 (Wednesday)

• Date: April 5 (Friday).

Reviewing and Report Guidelines

• For all milestones and the final report(s), you should email an electronic copy of the report as per the exact instructions below.
• Email instructions: 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 two reviewer pairs that will review your report (or 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 "TDDE35 project: (insert something here)" 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 (conference) templates, which can be found here, in conference mode (i.e., \documentclass[format=sigconf]{acmart}).
• 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 research articles (e.g., conference papers published in proceedings or journal articles published in journals) or books for your references.

Milestones

• 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, but should be no longer than 1 page (+ a brief gameplan that explains what you have done thus far and how and when you will complete the rest).
• Note 1: You will have a fair bit of freedom in exactly what you do. 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: I would like to see that you (either now, or in the next few weeks, if you start broadly) try to find a sub-problem that you think that you in some way can analyze, test, or otherwise investigate deeper (e.g., through simple experiments, simulations, or measurements). For example, in the case of the caching context, you could imagine doing a performance comparison of two caching policies, look at the value of prefetching, investigate how much of all the content actually can be cached, how much of it results in cache hits, etc.). Many of these are things you can investigate using small-scale experiments (e.g., looking into HTTP headers and caching rules of regular proxies), running simulations, perform some basic calculations, etc., just to give some examples.
• Note 3: Please check if you can find some 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. For this course, you can either investigate something that have been done before (e.g., an experiment or hypotesis that you want to understand or try for yourself, but that already have been answered/addressed by others) or something new (e.g., an experiment or hypotesis that some research paper inspire you to test, or that you find intersting in general).
• Requested email subject [added for 2025]: "TDDE35: Milestone 1 report by group Y, requesting feedback from group X", where Y and X are obtained from the table below. For the feedback, please just reply all.
• Deadline: Apr. 10, 2024 (same day as mid-term seminar)
• Feedback deadline: Apr. 12, 2024

@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}
} 

• You are expected to give a clear 3 minute presentation in which you present the problem, motivate the importance of the problem, your methodology, and what you hope to answer/verify.
• 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: April 10, 2024 (same day as mid-term seminar) (if remote, zoom link will be provided; likely via mailing list)

• You are expected to have written a methodology section that clearly describes the tools and methods that you will use 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 and your initial experimentation, you may also want to revise your preliminary introduction and timeplan, 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 3-4 pages, have a clear outline, well-written sections, and figures which clearly capture the problem and/or methodology. I also expect to see at least one properly formatted reference to a related research article published in a top-tier conference or journal. (One crude -- but perhaps okay for the purpose of this course -- way to find (at least) well-cited venues where one can look for reated papers is to use the search function here to identify venues with high h5 index. For many of the projects in this course, the top internet measurement conferences IMC and PAM may also provide accessible papers ...)
• Requested email subject: "TDDE35: Milestone 2 report by group Y, requesting feedback from group X", where Y and X are obtained from the table below. For the feedback, please just reply all.
• Deadline: Apr. 19, 2024
• Feedback deadline: Apr. 22, 2024

• 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. For example, please remove any "expected result" section that you may have (temporarily) included for the previous milestone and instead write about the actual results that you have obtained.
• At this point your report is expected to be 5-8 pages, have a clear outline, be well-written sections (e.g., introduction, methodology, results, and conclusions), and have figures which clearly capture the problem, results, and/or methodology.
• Requested email subject: "TDDE35: Milestone 3 report by group Y, requesting feedback from group X", where Y and X are obtained from the table below. For the feedback, please just reply all.
• Deadline: May 3, 2024
• Feedback deadline: May 6 (remember to bring forward what you think the final report should focus on).

• 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 (including results).
• 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 8 and May 15, 2024
• Feedback deadlines: May 10 and May 17, respectively (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. (As with other feedback, this is done in email to the other group, and with cc: to Niklas.)
• You are expected to attend all seminar presentations.
• Requested email subject: "TDDE35: Seminar feedback to group Y from group X", where Y and X are obtained from the table below.

• 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 (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 (such as to make things clearer, for example)? If so, perhaps, some parts of the report can be improved ...
• At this point your condensed report is expected to be 5 pages, have a clear outline, be well-written sections, and have figures which clearly capture the problem and/or methodology. (Any additional results that you may want to present you can put in a well marked appendix.)
• Requested email subject: "TDDE35: Final report by group Y, requesting feedback from group X1 and X2", where Y and X1 and X2 are obtained from the table below. For the feedback, please just reply all (and adjust receive list to include the address of all students in Y and your group (X1 or X2)).
• Deadline: May 22, 2024
• Feedback deadline: May 24 (this review should clearly state your general assessment of the report, and if you find the report acceptable or not)

Feedback group assignment (2024)

1. Find your group and group number (Y) in the first two columns. This gives you the row that defines to which groups you should send your report for feedback.
2. For this week's milestone, identify the group number indicated in the column (X) for that milestones. This is the group (or groups) that you should send you report to for feedback. (Use webreg to find the names of the group members of that group.)
3. As with your other reports, for the seminar, you should expect feedback from the group specified in the corresponding column. (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. Example [based on 2024 schedule]: For milestone 1, group 1 should send their report to group 2, who should then give feedback on group 1's report. Similarly, for milestone 2, group 1 should send their report to group 3 with a requested email subject: "TDDE35: Milestone 2 report by group 1, requesting feedback from group 3". Finally, for the seminar, group 1 will receive feedback from group 5. In this case, group 5 should send group 1 an email with subject: "TDDE35: Seminar feedback to group 1 from group 5".

Preliminary Seminar Schedule (2024)

Wednesday, May 8, 2024 [13:15-19:00]

• Group A:
• Group B:

• Reserved for project discussion, research overview, course overview, etc. (+ likely some breaks) [and buffer]

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 [13:15-19:00]

• Group Q:
• Group Z:

• Reserved for project discussion, research overview (2021), course overview (2021), exam discussion, etc. (+ likely some breaks) [and buffer]