COMP90007 Internet Technologies, Project 2 Semester 1, 2021
Due Date: May 26, 5pm
1 Introduction
This project forms 15% of your final mark. The project is about creating a short survey on a recent hot topic in networking that we give as below. This is a cornerstone activity that we would like you to learn for your continuing development. In our sector, this is an activity you would need to do regularly to keep up-to-date with developments and in some cases present to your supervisors/teams.
The main outcome of this project is a short report. Detailed report formatting instructions are found at the end of this project description.
For this project, students need to write a brief survey on the topic of Routing in P2P Overlay Networks. This is a recent topic of interest in networking that will be good to learn a bit about through writing a short survey.
You should initially start reading Wikipedia, news, and similar articles/webpages to get a high- level idea for what the topic is about. Then you should use scholar.google.com or similar scholarly publication search engines for performing a more detailed background search and do further reading. These engines give you the papers you will cite for your survey that will count. A good book to start reading the sections on this topic is also the ¡°Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design¡± by Coulouris et al (4th edition). It would give you a good intro. There are many other books that could help as well. It is important to note that if you login to our library with your student credentials, you will be able to access papers and some books that are returned by the paper engines as well and for free of charge in many cases. Note: Using pure google.com is a good start to find things or any book on the topic for that matter to get the main ideas, but these will most likely land you on more general items, discussions, i.e., rather than recent research, developments and proper full articles on individual algorithms/methods.
You are encouraged to find other survey papers that already exist in this topic as well. You do not need to start your survey from scratch if you find one basically. There would be many surveys out there potentially. Find one that is most recent. Better, find many and you will see authors look at similar but not the same set of algorithms/protocols/topics. They may also have different classifications and organization of things. These should give you an idea on what common/popular methods exist and what key comparison parameters you can have between solutions. They are also a good examples on how to write surveys. You cannot use other surveys or other papers at large to copy things directly into your own surveys. These should not be the sole source of your work anyway. After you refer to these, then you need to go to individual key papers mentioned in the surveys and start reviewing them, you need to make your own judgements and categorizations basically and also check more recent works (although many of the categories you create could be similar to other survey papers in the area.)
As expected from any survey, students are expected to not only list top papers in an area one after the other, but also categorize these developments/approaches and
compare/critique them. This is at the core of a survey. A list of papers with comments attached is called an ¡°annotated biblio¡± and is not a survey and is not the purpose of this project.
It is important to note that this is a simple survey exercise, we do not expect you to learn every paper in detail and to be comprehensive about the topic at your level. But rather cover the key papers, classifications/parameters. The number of citations a paper gets in scholar.google.com is an indicator about its leadership in the field, i.e., in addition to the fact that it is cited in other surveys. For this survey, if you cite about 5 such papers/algorithms in total that would be adequate. More is doable and acceptable obviously.
The stages of your project can be summarized as: Background search/reading selected papers (should not take more than one week to ten days, even considering other duties); then organization of your report with titles and subtitles, figure captions, etc, comes… while populating sections with key bullet points/issues to mention in these sections… Finally, finishing your report by writing the details of each point and drawing figures/tables.
After this exercise students are expected to have a good idea in the topic. The topic we have chosen is something you would already be partially familiar with, a topic in the area of network routing basically, and you are familiar with the concepts of numerous routing algorithms already from the Network layer we have studied in class.
Following report section-headings are highly recommended:
– Identification Info/title/etc (1/2 pages)
– Introduction to the Topic (1 page)
– Related Work Details (2 pages)
– Comparison of Key Approaches (benefits and disadvantages) (2 pages)
– Conclusions and Future Directions (1 page)
– References (1/2 pages)
When reading the papers, please note that a technical paper is not read like a novel, i.e., not read from cover to cover sequentially, but is read in a manner that you can quickly grasp the key ideas, benefits/disadvantages. In particular, to write a survey, this is what we need. At implementation time, technical papers could be read to the very detail or even one can contact authors for implementations. We do not need that level of reading per method/paper from you for your report.
2 Project Administration
The deadline for the report which is the sole output of this project is specified at the start of this document. Late submissions will get a penalty of 10% per day, similar to the previous assignments and projects. The report must be submitted as a PDF file on LMS via a link which will be made available before the deadline. Handwritten reports are not accepted in any form. Please include a proper title for the survey and your name, student id and login username as well at the beginning.
The report should be in A4 size paper in 12-point Times New Roman for the main text with 1.5 line spacing with 1-inch margins. It should be single column. The report should not exceed 7 pages. Also in these 7 pages putting many figures one after the other is not an acceptable report and text that describes methods is important to understand the algorithms. A
few figures that give an example for a key approach or two are acceptable. Table(s) for comparing methods is highly recommended.
All explanations should be your own words and proper citations should be used when needed. This project is an individual project. Students should work independently of each other on this project and plagiarism issues as usual will be checked by markers and our systems. Not sharing information about papers you found is also important as finding papers is a part of the experience.
The marking criteria for this project is as follows:
– Format and structure of the report (2 points)
– Coverage of the survey regarding papers read/found (4 points)
– Description of the individual papers in report (4 points)
– Categorization and comparison of papers/approaches (3 points)
– Future directions and concluding discussions (2 points)