Term Paper Due: November 20, 2002
Term Papers

Project Presentation Schedule

2001 Term Paper Topics

Term papers should be relatively short, 5,000 words at the maximum. The topic should be chosen from, IEEE Network, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Proceedings, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Journal of the ACM, Communications of the ACM, Bell System Technical Journal among others. Please discuss the topics with me before starting them. The objective of the term paper is for you to learn about an area of computer communication networks in depth and become our resident expert.

Here is a list of topics that might capture your interest:

  1. User identity and location management: This is the problem of determining who is "logged in" and where. The problem will become more complex in the future as people use mobile computers, net phones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), net devices, and walk-up computing within an organization. Not all of these devices will have existing "user login" mechanisms like Windows operating systems.

  2. Quality of Service (QoS) /policy networking: Networked applications require different delivery services for different types of data. Quality of service is highly dependent upon the information that is being transmitted by the network. Certain information will require exact transmission, but not speed, i.e. bank account balances. Some transmissions can survive small omissions of information, but need to be sent without delay, i.e. audio or video messages. Still other transmissions require both speed and completeness, or neither. As a result, there needs to be a policy in place to recognize and accommodate each situation in a different way (differentiated service). Quality of service describes the types of delivery service and the ways in which the underlying network hardware provides those services. It is managed by network policies, which control the way individual network components forward network data and meet requirements for reliability or delay.
  3. Information model/directory integration: As applications and services in networks become more tightly integrated, they require an underlying framework for exchange of information. For example, in a situation where a user may access the network from multiple locations, the user's current login information must be coordinated with the network's policies for QoS and service access. Information is often exchanged within a network through a directory, as provided by Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or Active Directory. Methods and standards for information organization and integration of directory services into network applications need to be developed.

  4. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) integration: Internet Protocol version 4 is a way of communicating between computers and is approaching the end of its run due to a lack of addressing capability. A new protocol, version 6, will step up to fill the gap caused by the exponential growth of the Internet. For computer networks to work with old and new machines, version 6 needs to be integrated into existing networks. Ipv6 also will improve routing of messages, address security, and include QoS capabilities.

  5. Wireless modems and networking: This technology for linking computers is useful in limited geographical areas, such as homes, buildings or campuses. Due to the fact that all users can "talk" at the same time, there are numerous "collisions", resulting in unintelligible data transmission. Algorithms for access to shared resources and the speed of communication are burgeoning fields with many possibilities. Measures of performance and testing the capabilities of standard (IEEE 802.11) wireless modems are of interest. Wireless networks are an important research area to facilitate to ubiquitous computing and access to the Internet.

  6. Benchmarking cluster and parallel computers: Cluster computers are simply a network of multiple low-end computers (PCs). They provide an efficient and economical way to solve large-scale scientific problems compared to high-end super computers. Another approach to increasing the speed of computing is the use of parallel computers that are composed of multiple processors connected in various ways. Benchmarking measures the execution speed of application programs and determines which connection strategy and networking protocols are best suited for a class of problems. We have developed a cluster computer test-bed at Bucknell to experiment with implementing scientific algorithms. Benchmarking computer networks is a related topic since the speed of the Internet is also dependent on the availability of fast computers or parallel computing.

All of the above research areas must focus on meeting the users' demand for critical characteristics of speed, reliability, and security of communications.

The paper proposal is due on October 9, 2002.

All students will be scheduled to present their research and conclusions to the class. We will begin oral presentations on November 20 , 2002.