COS-561 Semester Project

The semester-long project in COS-561 is an open-ended networking research project, interpreted broadly. Students registered for a A-F grade must take part in a project, either alone or in groups; students merely auditing the class are excused from the project. The project must include some sort of quantitative performance evaluation via simulation (e.g., ns-2), emulation (e.g., Emulab), or deployment (e.g., PlanetLab or VINI).

The project time-line is as follows:

• Proposal discussion: One-on-one meeting with instructor to discuss projects before fall break. Meetings to be scheduled by the student.
• Project proposal: Brief written project proposal due in class on Thursday Oct 23, before fall break.
• Project status discussion: Optional, but recommended, during the second half of the semester. Meetings to be scheduled by the student.
• Final report: Project writeups are due on Dean's Date (1/13) at 11:59pm EST (both emailed PDF file, and hardcopy). Project write-ups should be 10 pages of double-columned, single-spaced, eleven-point font.
• Final presentation: Groups are expected to present a high-quality 15-20 minute presentation of their project. These presentations will take place during on 1/??.

Project Management

You should strongly consider using either CVS or Subversion to perform source code control for your project and the paper you write describing it, especially if you are doing a group project. The CS department has a CVS server you can use to store and maintain your CVS repository.

I also strongly suggest writing your course project report using LaTeX. Latex is the de-facto tool used to write CS research papers. While it has a bit of start up cost, it's much easier to collaboratively write complex research papers using LaTeX than using Word.

Project Presentation Schedule