Centre closure

As part of a broader organisational restructure, data networking research at Swinburne University of Technology has moved from the Centre for Advanced Internet Architecture (CAIA) to the Internet For Things (I4T) Research Lab.

Although CAIA no longer exists, this website reflects CAIA's activities and outputs between March 2002 and February 2017, and is being maintained as a service to the broader data networking research community.

Summer 2013/2014 Undergraduate Internships at CAIA
Monday December 2nd 2013 -- Friday February 14th 2014

***** NOTE: DATE TO SUBMIT KEY EXTENDED UNTIL MONDAY OCTOBER 21st *****

CAIA is offering internships over the summer 2013/2014 break for students who are currently 2 (or more) years through a Telecommunications Engineering, Electronic Engineering or Computer Engineering bachelors degree at an Australian university (or an approved double-degree containing one of those degree programs). The ideal candidate will have a strong interest in IP data networking and be curious about research in Internet protocol design, development and evaluation.

The internship will last for 11 weeks, from Monday December 2nd 2013 to Friday February 14th 2014 with a break for Christmas from December 25th to January 1st inclusive. Applicants are expected to be available for the entire 11 week period.
Potential applicants should make initial contact with CAIA by midday, Monday October 21st 2013.

Projects:

Successful applicants will be assigned to a project based on our evaluation of applicant skillset and academic record. You will work with a member of CAIA Research staff as directed by Professor Grenville Armitage

Goal:

Internships are an opportunity to explore life in a research centre, collaborate with experienced academic staff and do a research project outside the boundaries of a regular undergraduate curriculum. You will begin to appreciate the combination of discipline and imagination that drives modern data networking research.

Stipend:

A tax-exempt stipend of $475/week will be paid to each intern under this scheme.

This internship is limited to students who meet the following criteria:

By the end of this current semester you will have completed 2 (or more) years of a Telecommunications Engineering, Electronic Engineering or Computer Engineering bachelors degree at an Australian university (or an approved double-degree containing one of those degree programs).

In 1st semester 2014 you will be continuing the bachelors degree (or double degree) listed in the preceding point.

You have achieved an average grade of at least 75% over your most recent 150 credit points of subjects studied for your Telecomms Engineering, Electronic Engineering or Computer Engineering degree. (A typical semester will have subjects totalling 50 credit points, so for many applicants this amounts to your most recent 3 semesters or 1.5 years up to mid-2013. It is not necessary that each subject's grades are above 75%, just that the overall average exceeds 75%.)

The first application round is in four parts. (Yes, this is a modest screening process.)

First: Put together a single page document (ASCII or pdf) that clearly:

States why you wish to be considered for this Internship (no more than half a page)

States that you are available full time from Monday December 2nd 2013 until Friday February 14th 2014.

Documents all your academic results (each subject and associated numeric grade) for the most recent 150 credit points (three semesters, which will not include 2nd Semester 2013 - see criteria above).

Second: By 12pm (midday) Monday October 21st, 2013:

generate a new SSH public/private key pair

email your new SSH public key by email to Mr Warren Harrop with Subject line reading "CAIA Internship, SSH key"

NOTE: This public key must be generated in a format suitable for use with OpenSSH under unix

Third: On Wednesday October 23rd 2013 you will receive an email requesting that you upload your document from Step 1 using SCP to an IP address specified in this email. You must complete this upload step by 5pm Friday October 25th 2013. (You will not need a password. If this requirement does not make sense, re-consider step 2.)

Fourth: On Tuesday October 29th 2013 we will contact all applicants by email regarding the results of this application process (and next steps, if any)

Note: Applications MUST be in pdf (with .pdf extension) or ASCII text (with .txt extension). Applications submitted in MS Word, OpenOffice, or any other format (including snail mail) will simply be ignored.

Final selection of applicants:

We may choose to use follow-up phone or in-person interviews to make our final selection. More details will be available after October 29th 2013. Where an objective tie-break is required, we will chose the person whose SSH key arrived first (in step 2 above).

Available Projects:

The following projects are available with the nominated academic staff members.

Project 1: Exploring high speed TCP congestion issues in large data centres

Supervisors: Professor Grenville Armitage, Lawrence Stewart (Netflix)

Description: An opportunity for one intern. We propose to evaluate emerging reactive (e.g. faster control loops) and proactive (e.g. burst de-correlation) techniques for managing "incast" TCP congestion events. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) carries the bulk of all traffic across most common types of data networks, including those in today's high-speed, low-latency datacenters. A key problem faced by commodity datacenters is incast congestion. Client queries are distributed by front-end nodes over TCP connections to multiple back-end servers, and the replies coming back tend to be highly correlated in time. This correlated reply traffic causes microsecond-timescale congestion ("microburst" congestion) in the multi-gigabit Ethernet switch buffers along the return path. TCP reacts far too slowly to packet losses in the context of high-speed and low RTT networks. Consequently, any packet loss caused by incast (microburst) congestion will stall the higher layers' data gathering pipe line (potentially for many tens of milliseconds) and unnecessarily increase client response times as a result.

Required skills: Understand how to capture and read IP packet traces with either Ethereal or tcpdump, be capable of installing FreeBSD or Linux onto a regular PC, have a basic understanding of IP networking principles (IPv4 addressing, port numbers, the basic differences between TCP and UDP), understand that 'dir' is not a unix command. Rudimentary coding skills in C, C++ or Java would be beneficial.

Project 2: The use of Multipath TCP in Vehicle to Infrastructure communications

Supervisor: Hai L. Vu, Grenville Armitage, Nigel Williams

Description: An opportunity for up to TWO interns to be involved in a project exploring the use of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to improve data communication in V2I. Intelligent transport systems (ITS) is an emerging technology aiming to increase safety and improve efficiency of transportation networks. ITS relies on real-time communication and information sharing between moving vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle, V2V) and road infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure, V2I). We will study the degree to which real-time knowledge of physical and MAC layer conditions may be used to proactively guide a vehicle's MPTCP layer's packet by packet choice of transmission path.

Required skills: Students are required to be enthusiastic about doing research and have background in at least one of the following areas: data (wireless) networking, software development and simulation, Unix kernel programming and data manipulation or statistics.