ECE 654 Advanced Computer Networks

Research Project

A significant portion of the course grade will be determined by the Term/Research project. For this project students are expected to study research papers and write a report on the topic of their interest. Some students may use this project for the literature review sections of their Masters Thesis. During the first part of the course I will be listing possible project titles. Students are encouraged to periodically check this page for new titles. Also, students are encouraged to find their own topics, however, in this case, they are expected to discuss their topic with me ahead of time. The final report will be due during the last day of classes. It can be written either in Greek or English and it is not expected to exceed 20 single spaced pages. The report should clearly state the problem(s) addressed, the models that have been developed to address the problem and some solution approaches. If possible, students should present their own approach to solve the problem. Finally, the report should include simulation results supporting the main conclusions of as well as a bibliography section with references to all material used.  For the simulation results, student are encouraged to used the OMNET++ simulator.   

OMNET++ (http://www.omnetpp.org/) is an open source simulator that models any type of networked interactions. It is based on C++ and is a modular, component-based simulator. To date it has been used to model all popular Internet protocols (e.g. TCP, UDP, SCTP, IP, Ethernet) and a broad range of wireless infrastructure-based or ad-hoc networks (e.g. LTE, WiFi, ZigBee). It has also been used to integrate road traffic microsimulator SUMO into the general OMNET++ package through Veins to enable intelligent transportation systems. Moreover, it has been used to build a tiny operating system, CometOS and an open source satellite simulator. Further it has been used to simulator more abstract concepts, including queuing models.

An excellent tutorial to get start with using OMNET++ can be found at: http://veins.car2x.org/tutorial/

A good reading list that makes use of OMNET++ for intelligent transportation systems can be found at:

http://veins.car2x.org/publications/ Along with the possible topics I will also list some references. This list is by no means complete and students are encouraged to look for additional references. (Hint: Check the references from the papers that you read). 

Possible Topics:

Voice over IP (VoIP): What are the main issues in providing Quality of Service (QoS) for VoIP and other applications with real time requirements.

  • IEEE Communications Magazine, Issue on QoS in IP and Wireless Networks, June 2004.
  • IEEE Communications Magazine, Issue on VoIP and QoS, July 2004.

Ad-Hoc Network Discovery and Routing: What are the main issues in Ad-Hoc routing

  • Chen et. al., “Span: An energy efficient coordination algorithm for topology maintenance in ad-hoc wireless networks”, ACM Wireless Networks, vol. 8, Sep. 2002.
  • E. M. Royer and C-K. Toh. “A review of current routing protocols for ad-hoc mobile wireless networks.” IEEE Personal Communications, April 1999.
  • Zygmunt Haas, Joe Halpern, and Li Li. “Gossip-Based Ad-hoc Routing.” IEEE INFOCOM 2002, New York, 2002.

Vehicular networks: Vehicle to vehicle or vehicle to infrastructure communication. 

Broadcasting and Multicasting: What are the main multicasting issues.

  • N. Vlajic, C.D. Charalambous and D. Makrakis, “Performance Aspects of Data Broadcast in Wireless Networks with User Retrials”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, pp.620-633, Aug. 2004.
  • Charikar, M.; Naor, J.; Schieber, B., “Resource optimization in QoS multicast routing of real-time multimedia” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 12 , no. 2 , pp. 340 – 348, April 2004
  • Deb, S.; Srikant, R., “Congestion control for fair resource allocation in networks with multicast flows”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 274 – 285, April 2004.

Label Switchng and MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS): There is a number of topics that one can investigate under this subject, ranging from Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning, QoS routing, traffic engineering, mobility, etc.

  • Z. Zhang, X. Shao, and W. Ding, “MPLS ATCC: An active traffic and congestion control mechanism in MPLS” Proceedings of the International Conferences on Info-tech and Info-net (ICII 2001), pp 222 – 227, Nov. 2001.
  • J.L. Marzo, E. Calle, C. Scoglio, and T. Anjah, “QoS online routing and MPLS multilevel protection: a survey”, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 41, no. 10, pp. 126-132, Oct. 2003.
  • A. Bosco, R. Mameli, E. Manconi, and F. Ubaldi, “Edge distributed admission control in MPLS networks”, IEEE Communications Letters, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 88-90, Feb. 2003.
  • S. Gonzlez-Valenzuela, and V.C.M. Leung, “QoS routing for MPLS networks employing mobile agents”, IEEE Network, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 16-21, May-June 2002.
  • Ying-Dar Lin, Nai-Bin Hsu, and Ren-Hung Hwang, “QoS routing granularity in MPLS networks”, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 58-65, Jun 2002.
  • P. Aukia, M. Kodialam, P.V.N. Koppol, T.V. Lakshman, H. Sarin, H. and B. Suter, “RATES: a server for MPLS traffic engineering”, IEEE Network, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 34-41, Mar-Apr 2000.
  • S.H. Lim, M.H. Yaacob, K.K. Phang, and T.C. Ling, “Traffic engineering enhancement to QoS-OSPF in DiffServ and MPLS networks”, IEEE Proceedings on Communications, vol. 151, no. 1, pp. 101-106, Feb. 2004

Network Security: Topics include distributed denial of service (DDoS), Intrusion detection, etc.

  • M. Bishop, “What is computer security?” IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, vol. 1, no.1 pp. 67-69, Jan-Feb 2003.
  • W.A. Arbaugh, “Wireless security is different”, Computer, vol. 36, no. 8, pp. 99-101, Aug. 2003
  • A. Chakrabarti, and G. Manimaran, “Internet infrastructure security: a taxonomy”, IEEE Network, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 13-21, Nov.-Dec. 2002
  • Qiang Huang, H. Kobayashi, and Bede Liu, “Modeling of distributed denial of service attacks in wireless networks”, IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and signal Processing PACRIM 2003, vol. 1, pp. 41-44, Aug. 2003
  • B.T. Wang, and H. Schulzrinne, “Analysis of denial-of-service attacks on denial-of-service defensive measures”, IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference GLOBECOM ’03, vol. 3, pp. 1339 – 1343, Dec. 2003
  • R.K.C. Chang, “Defending against flooding-based distributed denial-of-service attacks: a tutorial”, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 40, no. 10, pp. 42-51, Oct. 2002.
  • Yong Xiong, S. Liu, and P. Sun, “On the defense of the distributed denial of service attacks: an on-off feedback control approach”, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 282-293, Jul 2001
  • C. Douligeris, and A. Mitrokotsa, “DDoS attacks and defense mechanisms: a classification”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology, pp. 190-193, Dec. 2003.
  • L. Feinstein, D. Schnackenberg, R. Balupari, and D. Kindred, “Statistical approaches to DDoS attack detection and response”,Proceedings of the DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exposition, pp. 303-314, Apr. 2003
  • J. Mirkovic, G. Prier, and P. Reiher, “Source-end DDoS defense”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, pp. 171-178, Apr. 2003.
  • A.D. Wood, and J.A. Stankovic, “Denial of service in sensor networks”, Computer, vol. 35, no. 10, pp. 54-62, Oct. 2002.
  • Han-Pang Huang and Chia-Ming Chang, “An active network-based intrusion detection and response systems”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control, vol. 2, pp. 1317-1322, 2004.
  • A. Mishra, K. Nadkarni, and A. Patcha, “Intrusion detection in wireless ad hoc networks”, IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 48-60, Feb 2004
  • Qing-Bo Yin, Li-Ran Shen, Ru-Bo zhang, Xue-Yao li and Hui-Qiang Wang, “Intrusion detection based on hidden Markov model”, International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, vol. 5, pp. 3115 – 3118, Nov. 2003
  • D. Watson, M. Smart, G.R. Malan, and F. Jahanian, “Protocol scrubbing: network security through transparent flow modification”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 261-273, Apr. 2004

 Open to suggestions…