Theme: Hot topics in fixed and Mobile Internet

nternet and mobile networks are the main communication networks that people and businesses use daily. Many interesting developments are taking place in the applications and services environment, e.g., social media, content distribution systems, users providing more and more of the content, new ecosystems and new emerging technologies like HTML 5.0 just to name some. Hundreds of millions of people are connected with each other and accessing information and rich media in the net. Internet and mobile networks are merging, if not already merged together. In spring 2012 the seminar on internetworking will cover the most interesting recent developments, current trends and future predictions of the Internet. Possible seminar topics include.

• Internet of Things
• Green ICT and energy efficiency in Internet
• Cloud computing technologies, services and systems
• New business ecosystems and business models
• Machine-to-Machine communications
• Future Internet technologies (e.g., HTML 5.0)
• Mobile Internet - new applications, services and businesses in smart-phones
• Interactive social networks and services

Topics:

1. Javascript pushing programming: depths and perspectives - Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko
2. HTML5 based networking - Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko
3. Implementing deep reputation mechanism in BitTorrent-like environment - Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko
4. Benefits and challenges of network coding in computer networking - Tutor: Li Ming
5. Analysis of the multipath transfer schemes for wired and wireless networks. - Tutor: Li Ming
6. How to combine Web of Things and Social Networking: Technologies and Applications - Tutor: Nie Pin
7. Energy- and Cost-Efficiency Analysis of Various Processors - Tutor: Zhonghong Ou
8. Is Virtualization Ready for Delay-Sensitive Applications? - Tutor: Zhonghong Ou
9. Bio-Inspired Wireless Networking - Tutor: Mario Di Francesco
10. Impact of Routing on Interference in Wireless Sensor Networks - Tutor: Mario Di Francesco
11. HTML 5 Frontend for the Internet-of-Things - Tutor: Mario Di Francesco
12. Smartphone-based Virtual Network Computing - Tutor: Mario Di Francesco
13. Evaluation of Virtual Machine Migration - Tutor: Mario Di Francesco
14. Mobile cloud computing - Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen
15. Mobile offloading - Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen
16. Cloud computing in mobile network infrastructure - Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen
17. Green cloud computing - Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen
18. Substitution of mobile services - Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen
19. Mobile certificate service - Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen
20. NFC in mobile phones - Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen
21. Routing in MANETs - Tutor: Vilen Looga
22. Web server software for small devices - Tutor: Vilen Looga
23. Cloud service migration - Tutor: Miika Komu
24. Adaptation of IEEE 1451 family of standards in practice. - Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar
25. Performance and energy-efficiency of modern programming languages on mobile devices - Tutor: Jukka K. Nurminen
26. Energy-efficient mobile advertising - Tutor: Jukka K. Nurminen
27. Survey: Energy Conservation in Mobile Devices using cellular networks - Tutor: Mohammad Hoque
28. Dynamic resource sharing among virtual OS instances - Tutor: Sumanta Saha
29. Implementing a simple data centric networking stack in Debian - Tutor: Sumanta Saha
30. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP - Tutor: Jukka K. Nurminen

Topics by Andrey Lukyanenko

1. Javascript pushing programming: depths and perspectives.

JavaScript each day achieves new levels of quality (especially engine speed) and functionality. The development is dictated by requests from new technologies, and is driven by user demands. While JavaScript first appeared as a simplistic scripting language, lately it was extended with AJAX technologies and even more recently it was shown that it can be used for running Linux in a browser, namely JSLinux, [1], based on professional virtual machine Qemu [2, 3]. The possibility of JSLinux shows that JavaScript stops to be amateur scripting language, it is now a full-fledged development language.

In this topic a student have to study recent changes in JavaScript language as well as new ways of its usage opposed to traditional ones. For example, how was it possible to write a fully functional Linux in a browser and execute? Does it really necessary to have Linux executed in a browser? What perspectives does it have (such as creation of advanced networking)?

References:

1. Fabrice Bellard. 2011. http://bellard.org/jslinux/
2. Fabrice Bellard. 2005. QEMU, a fast and portable dynamic translator. In Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATEC '05). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 41-41.
3. qemu.org

Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko

2. HTML5 based networking.

HTML5 is most advanced specification for HTTP, in near future new web-applications and services will be erupted based on the technologies, as well as traditional services will be naturally moved towards plain HTML usage (instead of external programs, such as Skype, or messengers). In this topic you need to study what new is introduced in HTML5 and what today's applications (which are not based on HTML) can be transferred to HTML5. For example, how feasible to use BitTorrent, Skype, and so on based on HTML5. And is it possible today to have ICN (information centric networking, or pub/sub) be implemented purely on HTML5 technologies?

References:

1. HTML5. http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
2. HTTP (P2P). http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/#peer-to-peer

Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko

3. Implementing deep reputation mechanism in BitTorrent-like environment.

This is more a practical task. There have been several works on BitTorrent/distributed reputation mechanisms [1, 2, 3], and in this work we would like to extend it. If we assume the strategy of tit-for-tat as the first level reputation, this can be extended on the next level, tit-for-tat, for those who are connected to our neighbors (to whom we already trying to do tit-for-tat), and so on.

In this work there is need to implement this strategy in OverSim simulator and measure it in mixed environment, where BitTorrent client and modified clients are present.

References:

1. Alex Sherman, Jason Nieh, and Clifford Stein. 2009. FairTorrent: bringing fairness to peer-to-peer systems. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies (CoNEXT '09).
2. Rameez Rahman, Tam?s Vink?, David Hales, Johan Pouwelse, and Henk Sips. 2011. Design space analysis for modeling incentives in distributed systems. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference on SIGCOMM (SIGCOMM '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 182-193.
3. Personal discussions are required.

Tutor: Andrey Lukyanenko

Topics by Li Ming

4. Benefits and challenges of network coding in computer networking

Network coding is considered as a generalization of conventional store-and-forward routing techniques and it was originally proposed in order to achieve multicast data delivery at the maximum data transfer rate in single-source multicast networks. Network coding can be used in several computer networking fields, such as p2p, multicast, fault tolerance transmission scheme, etc. Although network coding can bring us promising benefits, these benefits come at the cost of computing power, speed, security concern, etc.

Requirement:
The student is required to summarize the state-of-the-art research on the applications of the network coding schemes and find out the benefits of network coding could bring us as well as the cost and challenges it has.

References:

1. Network coding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_coding/
2. Suyu Wang; Xuejuan Gao; Li Zhuo; , "Survey of network coding and its benefits in energy saving over wireless sensor networks," Information, Communications and Signal Processing, 2009. ICICS 2009. 7th International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1-5, 8-10 Dec. 2009 doi: 10.1109/ICICS.2009.5397467
3. Lei Wang; Guoyin Zhang; Chunguang Ma; Xu Fan; , "Application research on network coding in WSN," Internet Computing for Science and Engineering (ICICSE), 2010 Fifth International Conference on , vol., no., pp.162-166, 1-2 Nov. 2010 doi:10.1109/ICICSE.2010.50

Tutor: Li Ming

5. Analysis of the multipath transfer schemes for wired and wireless networks.

In recent years, the emergence of multi-interface (LAN, WiFi, 3G, WMAN, etc) devices makes ubiquitous access to the Internet possible. Users who access to the network resources anywhere and at any time also expect to take advantage of these multi-homing devices to improve the end-to-end communication performance and resilience by using several interfaces simultaneously. To realize this expectation, both the research community and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have devoted much attention to multipath transmission during recent years.

Research Target:
This paper would survey and analyze the proposed multipath transfer schemes for wired and wireless networks. The student should describe the technological approach behind each scheme and category the schemes according to some criteria.

References:

1. S. Barr, C. Paasch, and O. Bonaventure. Multipath tcp: From theory to practice. In IFIP Networking, Valencia, May 2011.
2. A. Ford, C. Raiciu, M. Handley, S. Barr´ e, and J. Iyengar. Architectural guidelines for multipath tcp development. draft-ietf-mptcp-architecture-05, IETF, 2010.
3. J. Iyengar, P. Amer, and R. Stewart. Concurrent multipath transfer using sctp multihoming over independent end-to-end paths. Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on, 14(5):951-964, oct. 2006.
4. V. Sharma, S. Kalyanaraman, K. Kar, K. Ramakrishnan, and V. Subra-manian. Mplot: A transport protocol exploiting multipath diversity using erasure codes. In INFOCOM 2008.

Tutor: Li Ming

Topics by Nie Pin

6. How to combine Web of Things and Social Networking: Technologies and Applications

The use of web has increasingly shifted to the use of social networking applications. Around ten years ago companies started to include www… addresses to their advertisements. Today, companies are increasingly adding their Facebook pages to their advertisements. If the first wave of Internet of things is to make the “things” regular internet objects, the second wave is to form a web-of-things, is the third wave then to make them social objects with friends, common interests etc. and what would this all mean. This task would require the student to investigate future scenarios of combining social networking with web of things, review the literature on the existing ideas, and think of ideas for future possibilities on this area.

References:

1. Dominique Guinard, Vlad Trifa, Friedemann Mattern and Erik Wilde, "From the Internet of Things to the Web of Things: Resource-oriented Architecture and Best Practices", Architecting the Internet of Things, pp. 97-129, Springer, 2011 http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/papers/dguinard-fromth-2010.pdf
2. Salvador Faria, “Middleware solutions for realtime sensing,” http://middlewaresensing.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/system-use-cases-and-refrigerator-experience/

Tutor: Nie Pin, Jukka K. Nurminen

Topics by Zhonghong Ou

7. Energy- and Cost-Efficiency Analysis of Various Processors

General-purpose computing domain has experienced strategy transfer from scale-up to scale-out in the past decade. In this task, you will take a step further to analyze various processors based cluster against Intel X86 clusters, from both energy- efficiency and cost-efficiency perspectives. A range of processors should be evaluated, including Intel (Xeon, Core, Atom), AMD processors, and ARM processors. Various applications are selected to represent diversified applications, including Web server throughput, in-memory database, and video transcoding. You are required to evaluate the various applications running in these processors, from both energy-efficient and cost-efficient perspectives.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Zhonghong Ou

8. Is Virtualization Ready for Delay-Sensitive Applications?

As a new paradigm, cloud computing opens new windows of provisioning services and applications by an “on demand” and “pay-as-you-go” manner. However, virtualization of the underlying resources also brings a certain number of tradeoffs. For instance, CPU cores and network interfaces are shared among a bunch of instances. This sharing of resources brings processing latency, incurs unnecessary packet loss, and lowers the network throughput, which are not desirable for cloud users. Furthermore, virtualization layer itself brings additional delay compared to non-virtualized environment. Whilst delay-sensitive applications, for example interactive games, are highly demanding in delay. It is interesting to ask: is virtualization ready for delay-sensitive applications?

In this task, you are expected to:

• Measure the processing delay, packet loss, and TCP/UDP throughput etc, of various delay-sensitive applications on both Amazon EC2 platform and localized platform.
• Find out the limitations (tradeoffs) of virtualization in cloud data centers.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Zhonghong Ou

Topics by Mario Di Francesco

9. Bio-Inspired Wireless Networking

Nature has always inspired human beings, not only in arts and crafts, but also in engineering complex systems. Biologically inspired approaches have been already applied to wireless networks, including: firefly synchronization for power management; ant colony optimization for routing; and artificial immune systems for security. A more recent approach for robust bio-inspired networking is based on the optimized structure of the DNA which regulates the expression (and repression) of genes.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: learn the basics of gene regulation in biological systems; study the mapping between biological systems and wireless networks; evaluate the effectiveness of such a mapping in terms of reliability.

References:

1. Falko Dressler and Ozgur B. Akan, "Bio-inspired networking: from theory to practice", IEEE Communications Magazine, 48(11):176-183, November 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2010.5621985
2. Preetam Ghosh, Michael Mayo, Vijender Chaitankar, Tanwir Habib, Edward Perkins, Sajal K. Das, "Principles of genomic robustness inspire fault-tolerant WSN topologies: A network science based case study", Proc. of the 7th International Workshop on Sensor Networks and Systems for Pervasive Computing (PerSeNS 2012), pp. 160-165, March 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOMW.2011.5766861

Tutor: Mario Di Francesco

10. Impact of Routing on Interference in Wireless Sensor Networks

Communication reliability in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is largely affected by interference. In addition to noisy radio sources, interference is mostly generated by devices which are closely located, as it usually happens in dense WSNs. Communication scheduling algorithms can reduce not only energy consumption, but also interference. However, they are extremely sensitive on the routing protocol used in the network.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: learn the basics of communication scheduling and routing in WSNs; understand the impact of routing on interference; evaluate how different routing protocols affect communication reliability.

References:

1. Ozlem D. Incel, Amitabha Ghosh, and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, "Scheduling algorithms for tree-based data collection in wireless sensor networks", volume Theoretical aspects of distributed computing in sensor networks, pages 407-445, Springer, 2011 http://anrg.usc.edu/~amitabhg/Scheduling-Survey-2010.pdf
2. Ozlem D. Incel, Amitabha Ghosh, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, and K. Chintalapudi, "Fast data collection in tree-based wireless sensor networks", IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing, 11(1):86-99, January 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2011.22

Tutor: Mario Di Francesco

11. HTML 5 Frontend for the Internet-of-Things

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is composed by a large number of interconnected devices. The huge amount of generated data needs to be conveniently accessed and visualized. This is especially important for heterogeneous and multimedia data, which are becoming increasingly important in recent applications. In this context, HTML5 is an effective and mobile device-friendly technology very suitable to develop a web frontend for the Internet-of-Things.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: learn about technologies for data exchange and storage in the IoT; review solutions for web-based data visualization and presentation; develop an HTML5 frontend for IoT data.

References:

1. Dominique Guinard, Vlad Trifa, Friedemann Mattern and Erik Wilde, "From the Internet of Things to the Web of Things: Resource-oriented Architecture and Best Practices", Architecting the Internet of Things, pp. 97-129, Springer, 2011 http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/papers/dguinard-fromth-2010.pdf
2. mbed.org, "mbed Internet of Things: HTML5 Websockets and Wifi", http://mbed.org/cookbook/IOT

Tutor: Mario Di Francesco

12. Smartphone-based Virtual Network Computing

Among all smartphone applications, virtual network computing has become increasingly popular as it enables mobile users to remotely control their workstation or personal computer. However, most of approaches to virtual network computing were targeted to wired scenarios and desktop computers, thus have not specifically addressed mobile devices.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: review the solutions already proposed for smartphone-based virtual network computing; investigate the usability of user interfaces for remote desktop access on mobile devices; address the reliability of the remote connection due to mobility and channel errors.

References:

1. Pieter Simoens, Filip De Turck, Bart Dhoedt, Piet Demeester, "Remote display solutions for mobile cloud computing", IEEE Computer, 44(8):46-53, August 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2011.70
2. Cheng-Lin Tsao, Sandeep Kakumanu, and Raghupathy Sivakumar, "SmartVNC: an effective remote computing solution for smartphones", Proc. of the 17th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking (MobiCom '11). pp. 13-24, September 2011 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2030613.2030616

Tutor: Mario Di Francesco

13. Evaluation of Virtual Machine Migration

An important aspect of cloud computing is represented by resource allocation and management. Virtual machine migration enables to seamlessly transfer a virtual environment from one host to a different one. Migration is useful for cloud reconfiguration so as to improve the utilization of the underlying infrastructure. However, it incurs a cost which can be significant.

The student involved in this topic is expected to: review the concept of virtual machine migration as well as the related approaches proposed in the literature; investigate means to measure the cost of virtual machine migration; evaluate the trade-off between migration cost and increased utilization of the cloud infrastructure.

References:

1. Christopher Clark, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Jacob Gorm Hansen, Eric Jul, Christian Limpach, Ian Pratt, and Andrew Warfield, "Live migration of virtual machines", Proc. of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI'05), Vol. 2. USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, pp. 273-286, 2005 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251223
2. William Voorsluys, James Broberg, Srikumar Venugopal, Rajkumar Buyya, "Cost of Virtual Machine Live Migration in Clouds: A Performance Evaluation", Proc. of the 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing (CloudCom 2009), December 1-4, pp. 254 -265, 2009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10665-1_23

Tutor: Mario Di Francesco

Topics by Sakari Luukkainen

14. Mobile cloud computing

Smartphones with advanced computing capabilities and features have increasingly dominated the mobile phone landscape in recent years. The functionalities of mobile devices can be further enhanced with cloud computing infrastructure. Mobile cloud computing can be defined as using cloud computing principles to deliver applications and services for mobile terminals. It enables delivering advanced applications to the mobile devices with limited data processing and storage capabilities by utilizing cloud resources such as data processing power and storage. Mobile terminal vendors have started to be active in the cloud service domain in order to give complementary value to their main products.

The study should cover following issues:

• Overview of mobile cloud computing
• End-user application types
• Select one service for further analysis (e.g. iCloud)
• Influence to the operators and terminal vendors business models

References:provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen

15. Mobile offloading

This topic focuses on a subset of mobile cloud computing – mobile computation offloading. It means offloading computation into the cloud, typically in order to enhance the computational capacity of the mobile device or save the battery power of the device. In addition, it focuses on native applications, the processing of which is dynamically executed either in the cloud or on the mobile device. It is a technology that attempts to overcome the challenges of mobility by migrating parts of computation outside the mobile terminal. Offloading transfers the control data and the application state information over the network to a machine called surrogate that will complete the computation task and send the results back to the mobile client.

The study should cover following issues:

• Overview of mobile offloading technology
• End-user application types
• Influence to the operators and terminal vendors business models
• Drivers and restraints for the technology

References:provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen

16. Cloud computing in mobile network infrastructure

With the massive growth of smartphones and tablets, data traffic is now consuming majority of bandwidth of mobile networks, which has resulted in local unpredictable network congestion. Thus operators have to make expensive base station investments in order to meet the demand of traffic peaks. The network equipment vendors have started to find a solution to this challenge from cloud computing. It can provide flexibility to the network infrastructure by elastically moving computation from base stations to centralized datacenters to fulfill unpredictable demand.

The study should cover following issues:

• Overview of cloud computing in mobile infrastructure
• Influence to the operators and terminal vendors business models
• Drivers and restraints for the technology

References:provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen

17.Green cloud computing

Companies have increasingly started to outsource their ICT infrastructure to large-scale centralized data centers managed by a specialized service provider. This trend is further enhanced by the proliferation of cloud computing technologies, which enable placing applications in the network.

The environmental effects of ICT have become a topic of great social significance. The electricity consumption of ICT service infrastructure is increasing and it is necessary to improve the effectiveness of the energy usage. Electricity is a significant cost item for the companies in this field and the importance of managing it is enhanced as a competitive advantage. Increased energy efficiency would also enable the provision of differentiated green cloud services.

The study should cover following issues:

• Overview of energy efficiency of datacenters
• Select one service provider as case study
• Green business models for datacenters

References:provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen

18. Substitution of mobile services

Internet services like Gmail, Skype and Facebook have started to challenge mobile operators’ business models, which are traditionally based on a walled garden principle. The voice and SMS services still generate most of the operators’ revenues today, but these traditional services have been commoditized and ARPU figures have decreased significantly because of the fierce competition. Thus the operators need to decide whether to adopt the emerging, possibly substituting, services and be exposed to the risk of cannibalization, or whether not to integrate and be exposed to the risk of increasing customer churn. That is why it is crucial for the operators to understand the effect of substitution between the various services.

The study should cover following issues:

• Select one Internet service as case study
• Describe the associated business model
• Analyse how the service change the market situation
• Influence to the operators business models

References:provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen

19. Mobile certificate service

The mobile certificate service provides strong authentication of end user by utilizing the SIM card of the mobile phone. The service is based on PKI technology and requires an encryption key, which is stored on the SIM card along with required user information.

The mobile certificate service is preceded by several other attempts to provide users with strong, digital authentication. However, these attempts have not succeeded in gaining place in the market. Instead, the Tupas authentication provided by the Finnish banks has become the most common method for strong authentication in Finnish Internet services. Although past failures have made the general public more skeptical toward digital authentication services, the mobile certificate service has been now introduced to market.

The study should cover following issues:

• Overview of mobile certificate technology
• End-user application types
• Influence to the operators business model
• Drivers and restraints for the service

References:provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen

20. NFC in mobile phones

With the ability to read RFID tags (with Near Field Communication, NFC) technology), mobile phones are natural mediators that allow connecting passive objects to the Internet. As NFC technology is becoming more widespread, mobile handsets may become the largest RFID reader infrastructure in the world, bringing the Internet of Things tangibly to the fingertips of consumers. Thus, mobile phones can function as displays for physical objects and act as browsers in the Internet of Things. The interaction of mobile phones with NFC capability and physical items equipped with NFC/RFID tags enables numerous interesting applications.

The study should cover following issues:

• Overview of mobile NFC technology
• End-user application types
• Influence to the operators and terminal vendors business models
• Drivers and restraints for mobile NFC

References:provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sakari Luukkainen

Topics by Vilen Looga

21. Routing in MANETs

The student will write a survey on the latest developments in routing for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, along with up-to-date performance evaluation of routing protocols done either by the student or referenced from a publication. For simplicity's sake, no more than 4 protocols should be chosen for comparison.

As the amount of use cases for MANETs grows along with number of devices used in such networks, it is important to understand what is required from a routing protocol in such an environment and how current implementations handle themselves.

References:

1. Implementation Experience with MANET Routing Protocols http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/decouto/papers/chin02.pdf
2. Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks by Krishna Gorantala

Tutor: Vilen Looga

22. Web server software for small devices

The goal of this paper is to give an overview and, if possible, to evaluate the performance of web-servers that are capable of running on very modest hardware, for example a mobile device.

So far mobile devices have been seen as only clients that connect to servers running on much more capable software. However, with growing hardware capability of smartphones, it is now possible to run web servers on the devices themselves, which opens up new interesting client application possibilities. What are the capabilities of current web servers? Are they scalable on multiple devices?

One way for the the student to get an excellent grade, would be to implement and evaluate an application for the mobile web server.

References:

1. Mobile Web Server for S60 http://sourceforge.net/projects/raccoon/
2. iJetty for Android http://code.google.com/p/i-jetty
3. kWS for Android http://www.appbrain.com/app/kws-android-web-server/org.xeustechnologies.android.kws

Tutor: Vilen Looga

Topics by Miika Komu

23. Cloud service migration

According to some sources [1], cloud APIs are hindering open-source software. Another threat with cloud APIs is that they result in vendor lock in despite of some advances [2]. However, some of the cloud service providers offer redundant services and migration from one provider to another could be facilitated with the help of middleware.

Task: Review 2-3 open-source PaaS service APIs offering a similar service and describe their differences/similarities. Produce high-level requirements for a middleware that could be used for seamless migration between the two services. Search the literature for cloud migration analysis and experiments.

References:

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/30/open_apis/
2. http://gigaom.com/cloud/meet-elastic-beanstalk-amazons-platform-play/

Tutor: Miika Komu

Topics by Sandeep Tamrakar

24. Adaptation of IEEE 1451 family of standards in practice.

The availability of low-cost, low-power, multi- functional sensors and actuators resulted in the widespread usage of sensors and actuators for different proposed. However, most of the sensors and actuators are designed for specific propose and are not inter-operable between the systems. Further, the development of communication and sensor technologies, and manufactures competitive nature introduced multiple standards between the devices. The introduction of IEEE 1451 standard incorporates existing and emerging sensor and communication technologies to provide a standard framework for interfacing such devices. In other words, it allow Plug and play capability to the IEEE 1451 capable sensor networks.

Task : The aim of this research study is to understand the IEEE 1451 standards, survey how well this standard has been adapted in practice. What are the obstucles for the adaptation (from user point of view, manufature point of view, service point of view) and finally suggest how well this standad favor the practical realization of Internet of things.

References:

1. E. Song and K. Lee, “Understanding ieee 1451-networked smart transducer interface standard - what is a smart transducer?” Instrumentation Measurement Magazine, IEEE, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 11 –17, April 2008.
2. K. Lee, “Brief description of the family of ieee 1451 standards,” Nation Institute of Standards and Technology: Workshop, September 2009, http://www.nist.gov/el/isd/ieee/1451family.cfm
3. E. Song and K. Lee, “An implementation of the proposed ieee 1451.0 and 1451.5 standards,” in Sensors Applications Symposium, 2006. Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE, 2006, pp. 72 – 77.

Tutor: Sandeep Tamrakar

Topics by Jukka K. Nurminen

25. Performance and energy-efficiency of modern programming languages on mobile devices

A recent phenomenon in programming languages is the arrival of languages that are using Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as a runtime environment but which have a more modern structure and possibilities than Java. Examples of such languages are Lisp-based Clojure and Scala. Because mobile devices, especially Android, are supporting JVM it is possible to run those also on mobile devices. When used on mobiles the performance and especially the energy-efficiency are of importance.

The task is to review what is already known about the performance of modern programming languages, experiment with simple benchmarks on mobile platform, and come up with tentative conclusions about the future potential of such languages on mobile devices. The work can focus on a single language or, alternatively, compare a number of languages.

References:

1. Sewe, A., “On the performance characteristics of Scala programs on the Java Virtual Machine”,
2. Berlin Brown, “JVM Notebook: Basic Clojure, Java and JVM Language,” performance http://berlinbrowndev.blogspot.com/2009/07/jvm-notebook-basic-clojure-java-and-jvm.html

Tutor: Jukka K. Nurminen

Topics by Jukka K. Nurminen

26. Energy-efficient mobile advertising

Advertising is a key business model for many web applications. When mobile advertising is becoming increasingly common, the effect the advertisements have on the mobile device performance is increasingly important. Especially the energy consumption of transferring and displaying the advertisements can become painful.

The task is to review what is known about the performance, especially energy, cost, of advertising, is it a significant issue, investigate what kind of technical solutions (if any) mobile advertising solutions apply to make advertising energy-efficient, and, ideally, come up with ideas what kind of techniques should be used to improve the energy-efficiency of mobile advertising.

References:

1. Simons, R.J.G and Pras, A. (2010) The Hidden Energy Cost of Web Advertising. Technical Report TR-CTIT-10-24, Centre for Telematics and Information Technology University of Twente, Enschede. ISSN 1381-3625
2. Subhankar Dhar and Upkar Varshney. 2011. Challenges and business models for mobile location-based services and advertising. Commun. ACM 54, 5 (May 2011), 121-128. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1941487.1941515

Tutor: Jukka K. Nurminen

30. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP

Several different kinds of solutions for doing adaptive video streaming exist today. The solutions are especially attractive for resource constrained devices like smart phones. DASH[1] stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP which is a technology being developed under MPEG. There are a number of other related mechanisms, such as Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming, Apple's HTTP Live Streaming, and Microsoft's Smooth Streaming. This topic reviews these different choices and compares there technological differences. Performance measurements, such as traffic and energy overhead vs. quality of stream, could be part of the work.

References:

1. Overview of MPEG-DASH Standard: http://dashpg.com/?page_id=25

Tutor: Jukka K. Nurminen

Topics by Mohammad Hoque

27. Survey: Energy Conservation in Mobile Devices using cellular networks

Nowadays mobile phone industries and wireless communication technologies are gearing forward at the same pace. With the recent developments of extra ordinary smart mobile devices, it is very common to have these devices augmented with different wireless network interfaces, such as Wi-Fi,3G(WCDMA), 3.5G(HSDPA) or 4G(LTE), Bluetooth, etc, to provide seamless data connectivity with extremely high data rate to the users. However, power consumption of these interfaces is a growing concern. For instance, continuous usages of 3G data connectivity in a mobile phone may reduce battery lifetime to 6 hours only. This lifetime also depends on the user applications. There have been a lot of work to extend the battery life of a mobile device while using different applications over different cellular networks (3G, 3.5, LTE) with different user situations (Moving or static). The purpose of this study is to have detail overview of different research work which study these interfaces power consumption behavior. This survey would also include researches which try to reduce or optimize power consumption of the mobile devices by applying techniques at different endpoints(mobile phone, operator networks), client applications, transport protocols, etc, and finally, to suggest future potential research scopes.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Mohammad Hoque

Topics by Sumanta Saha

28. Dynamic resource sharing among virtual OS instances

Many commercial vendors (e.g. Amazon) now offers cloud services where people can rent virtual instance of any OS and utilize that in a need-basis. Usually, these systems are provisioned in a dynamic way, that is, the virtual instances occupy only the needed resources and frees the rest for the use of other instances. The student should study such solutions (preferably standard and popular ones, which have real-life implementation and use, e,g, VMware, KVM, etc), and gather the algorithmic ways that these products use to achieve such dynamism. The output of the study should act like a tutorial for any new organization setting up a virtual environment with dynamic resource sharing.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sumanta Saha

29. Implementing a simple data centric networking stack in Debian

This topic is mostly implementation specific. I have a very simple data centric forwarding layer implementation in NS-3. The student is expected to port to code to debian based linux. The student should be proficient in C/C++. Familiarity with kernel programming is a plus. The forwarding layer can be implemented as a user space daemon or a kernel module, which ever is easier for the student. The basic part of the forwarding layer is available for the student as NS-3 code. The primary responsibility would be to port it, and then do further enhancements for better grades. For testing, networked virtual machines would be enough. However, if interested, the student can also set up a simple lab environment for testing the code. The final report should list all the challenges faced by the student, along with the algorithms s/he used to solve/improve the forwarding layer. The report can also review relevant literature from where the student can borrow ideas.

References: provided after the topic is assigned.

Tutor: Sumanta Saha