Overview

The course project may be completed individually or in a group of up to three students. Each team will choose one of two tracks. Both tracks have the same expectations for technical depth, evaluation, documentation, and final presentation.

Track 1: Research Project

In the research track, you will formulate and investigate an open-ended research question in computer networking or networked systems. A strong project should:

  • Identify an important problem and explain why existing approaches are insufficient
  • Develop a hypothesis, design, or new approach
  • Compare against appropriate baselines or related work
  • Evaluate the idea through experiments, analysis, or a prototype
  • Clearly explain both positive and negative results

A project does not need to produce a successful new system or technique, but it must demonstrate a rigorous investigation and meaningful progress on the proposed question.

Track 2: Open-Source Engineering Project

In the engineering track, you will build a useful networking tool that is not adequately provided by existing open-source software. The project should address a concrete need faced by networking researchers, developers, operators, educators, or students.

A strong engineering project should:

  • Identify a specific intended user and an important unmet need
  • Survey related tools and clearly explain the gap being addressed
  • Include a substantial, technically meaningful implementation rather than a thin wrapper or visualization of an existing tool
  • Demonstrate correctness and usefulness using realistic examples or workloads
  • Be released as open-source software with a license, installation instructions, documentation, examples, and tests
  • Include a working demonstration in the final presentation

Project ideas

We will provide a list of possible research and engineering project ideas. You are also strongly encouraged to propose your own idea.

Proposal

The two-page proposal should describe the problem, its relationship to the course, the proposed work, the responsibilities of each team member, the resources required, and how the outcome will be evaluated. Your proposal should convince us that the project is relevant, technically meaningful, feasible within one semester, and supported by a concrete evaluation plan.

Research-track proposals should state the research question, summarize related work, explain the proposed approach, identify appropriate baselines, and describe the experiments or analysis that will answer the research question.

Engineering-track proposals should identify the intended users and their current workflow, survey existing tools, explain the missing capability, define the proposed interface and implementation, and describe how you will demonstrate correctness and usefulness. The proposal must also explain how the project can be developed and evaluated without specialized hardware or a multi-GPU cluster.

In your proposal, include three types of goals: 75% goals, 100% goals, and 125% goals. Think of these as the equivalent of a B, an A, and a “wow!” grade. The goals can be dependent or independent of the previous goals.

Consider also providing answers to the Heilmeier Questions in your proposal, as appropriate.

Please use the ACM HotNets Latex template for the proposal.

Midterm checkpoint meeting

Each project team is required to schedule a checkpoint meeting with the instructor on Oct 23. The purpose of this meeting is to provide an early feedback on your progress to help ensure that your final report is great.

Final report and presentation

Each project team is required to submit a final report and give a presentation at the end of the semester. The final report should be 6 pages long. Research-track reports should present the question, related work, approach, and evaluation. Engineering-track reports should document the need, comparison with existing tools, design and implementation, testing, evaluation, and lessons learned. Engineering teams must also provide a link to the open-source repository and give a working demonstration during the final presentation.

Please use the ACM HotNets Latex template for the final report.

Important dates

  • Proposal (2 pages): Sep 25.
  • In-class project presentation: Dec 1 and 3.
  • Final report (6 pages): Dec 4.
  • Please use the ACM HotNets Latex template for the proposal and final report.