TDDE48 Mobile Networks

Scenarios and Project

Scenarios

The (preliminary) scenarios to be used in your PBL groups can be found here.

These scenarios will provide you an opportunity to dive deeper into selected aspects of the course. They will also be used for the project part of the course.

Note re. purpose + expectations [2023]: These scenarios are intentionally (and as intended with PBL) designed to be open ended and give you lots of freedom to practice (1) identifying, (2) exploring, and (3) learning about problems related to each scenario.

For some weeks, there are several choices of scenarios. In some cases, you may select a scenario where some person/people in your group has/have the scenario as their group project and in other cases this will not be the case. Different groups are therefore likely to explore different aspects, as well as cover the topics in both different breadth and depth.

While the scenarios and the problems that you identify are intended to be open ended, if you run short of ideas, the general "theme" is performance in and for mobile systems. You are therefore expected to be able to identify, explore, and learn about performance tradeoffs and optimization aspects related to each of the different scenarios and/or the specific protocols identified relevant to the scenarios.

Finally, please use the meetings to explore these scenarios (which is what you do get credits for here) and practice the mentioned skills (which will help you in the longer term), NOT studying for exams (which you get other credits for). (Side note: Yet, some tweaks have been made to provide more opportunities for scenarios to build depth and breadth knowledge useful for the exam.)

Project Overview

Expectations and grading

The goal is to produce a report that include both theoretic background and some practical results that gives insights into some systems aspects. Your methodology is expected to be sound, clearly explained, and the results are expected to be clearly presented.

Grading: You will be given a 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.

For a passing grade, a literature-driven investigation is typically okay. However, for grades 4 and 5, I would typically expect at least some attempt(s) to experiments, measurements, or validation of some hypothesis/result, for example. The depth and quality of the reports are of course other important aspects taken into account when evaluating the reports.

Bonus marks: You can only obtain bonus marks towards the original TEN1 exam (Oct. the year you do the project). You cannot save bonus marks for later. These bonus marks are based on the status of the project at the time of the original project deadline; typically not through complementing work. More explenation regarding the bonus marks and how they will be counted towards the TEN1 exam can be found on the examination webpage.

Reviewing and Report Guidelines

• 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 the group(s) that will review your report (or that you are reviewing), (ii) the instructor (Niklas), and (iii) all members of your own group.
• Only LiU email addresses should be used for this communication and all communication should have "TDDE48 project: (insert something here)" in the subject heading.
• In addition, for milestone 3, you should print a hardcopy of your report (in its current shape) and place in the mailbox outside cafe java, addressed to Niklas.
• For the report(s) you should use the default ACM SIG-proceedings templates, which can be found here.
• To make sure we all use the same format, please use the most common sigconf format (together with the default ACM SIG-proceedings template). If you use the latex template, this simply corresponds to using the line \documentclass[format=sigconf]{acmart} at the top of the document. An example of a recent paper using such a formating 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 conference proceedings or journals) for your references.

Milestones

• The project will be done in pairs, so please find a partner and register with that person for the particular scenario that you select. We recommend that you do the project with the same person as you will do the assignments.
• When you register in Webreg you will be able to pick a scenario, based on which you will define your project. You are expected to pick a scenario from the PBL part of the course (see slides above) around which you (for the next milestone) will identify a problem that you can motivate the importance of and come up with a plan to analyze. There will only be a limited number of groups per scenario, so please have a backup scenario or two in mind before registering.
• In the case you want to define your own project based on some other topic from the course, outside the scenarios provided in the PBL-part of the course, you are expected to talk to the instructor. Before approving such proposal, he will likely ask you to provide a clear problem definition and motivation (see milestone 1 below), as well as carefully explain how the project will fit within the course curriculum.
• Register here
• Deadline: Sept. 1 (2023)

• After milestone 0, your group will be assigned reviewer pairs for each milestone (as you for each milestone will be asked to give feedback on each others reports). Note that each milestone may or may not have a different feedback pair. These assignments can can be found at the bottom of this page.
• Expected date: Sept. 2-4 (2023). Online Sept. 2 (2023).

• 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).
• Note 1: You will have a lot of freedom in exactly what you do. Having said that, it is important for you as a group to visualize what you target as your end goal. Therefore, 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 read 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).
• Deadline: Sept. 8 (2023)
• Feedback deadline: Sept. 11 (2023)

@article{dan2012centralized,
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{borghol2012untold,
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 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, you may also want to revise your preliminary introduction, from last milestone.)
• Remember that you are expected to use the sigconf format. If you use the latex template, this simply corresponds to using the line \documentclass[format=sigconf]{acmart} at the top of the document.
• Note that you may want to leverage and integrate this milestone with scenario 4 from the PBL meetings.
• 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 that clearly capture the problem and methodology.
• Deadline: Sept. 20 (2023)
• Feedback deadline: Sept. 22 (2023)

• Given the tight timeline after this deadline, you are expected to have a very good anc close to complete report at this time. You should have performed most (if not all) of your 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 have written and included 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 sections from the previous milestone as you see best fit, and based on the feedback from your review groups. Also, at this time you should have some preliminary results, so please remove what you had written about "expected results" and instead write about your "preliminary results" ...
• At this time 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.
• Deadline: Oct. 4 (2023)
• Feedback deadline: Oct. 6 (2023). 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.
• 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: Oct. 9 or Oct. 10 (2023)
• Feedback deadline: Same day (Oct. 9 or Oct. 10). Please 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.
• You are expected to attend all seminar presentations.

• 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? If so, perhaps, some parts of the report can be improved ...
• At this time your condensed report is expected to be 4 pages, have a clear outline, be well-written sections, and have figures which clearly capture the problem and/or methodology. (Answer to student question [16/10/19]: If you have many references, it is okay to have 4 pages + references on a separate page. If you just have one or two reference, I would suggest trying to fit them within the 4 pages.)
• Deadline: Oct. 13 (2023)
• Feedback deadline: Oct. 16 (2023). This review should clearly state your general assessment of the report, and if you find the report acceptable or not.

Feedback group assignment (2023)

1. Find the row with your name and group number (listed in the first two columns). This gives you the row from which you can read which group(s) you should send your report to, for feedback for each milestone (and from which you should receive feedback).
2. For a particular week's 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.)
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.)

Note: As per request, to ensure a high level of privacy, student IDs are omitted below. Instead, please find email addresses (or student IDs) for the other groups in webreg.

Preliminary/approximate(*) Seminar Schedule (2022)

(*) Note that times are approximate and sometimes differ somewhat from session-to-session and time-to-time.

Monday, October 9, 2023

• 1.1 Amanda + Julia (feedback from 5.3)
• 3.1 Hanna + Mathilda (feedback from 5.4)

• 3.2 Edwin + Martin (feedback from 5.5)
• 3.3 Karl + Lukas (feedback from 5.x)

• 3.4 Anton + Erik (feedback from 5.y)
• 3.5 Johan + Oscar (feedback from 1.1)

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

• 3.x Josefin + Silva (feedback from 3.1)
• 3.y Stephanie + Fredrik (feedback from 3.2)

• 4.1 Elias + Isak (feedback from 3.3)
• 5.1 Andreas + Klara (feedback from 3.4)

• 5.2 Gor + Zebastian (feedback from 3.5)
• 5.3 Alice + Sofie (feedback from 3.x)

• 5.4 Arvid + Daniel (feedback from 3.y)
• 5.5 Jon + Simon (feedback from 4.1)

• 5.x Ludvig + Max (feedback from 5.1)
• 5.y Elin + Tove (feedback from 5.2)

• Short research examples: 2020, 2018, 2017, publications, or video (2016)
• High-level feedback and suggestions for final report
• Study suggestions/overview for the exam