Project Ideas
To stimulate ideas and proposals here is a collection of undergraduate and minor thesis project ideas,
in no particular order of importance or probable complexity.
Short projects of a few weeks duration might be suitable for undergraduate projects.
Long projects may be suitable for a solid half year research effort
(e.g. a minor thesis in a Masters by coursework program).
Contact Associate Professor Grenville Armitage, Dr Philip Branch, Dr Hai Vu, or Dr Jason But
if you are interested in pursuing one of them. Alternatively, propose something else along these lines
or more generally in one of the centre's research areas.
Completed projects can be found here.
Short projects
Fairness of usage caps in Internet access services
Some Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) manage customer network use through Usage Caps - a limit on the number of megabytes your transfer each month before incurring extra charges or reductions in available bandwidth. An important question is how many of those (mega)bytes were actually meaningful or useful to the consumer. Everytime a consumer surfs a web page or streams media using http, downloads files using ftp, or sends and receives email that consumer's computer sends packets using the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. TCP ensures 'reliable' data transfer for http, ftp and similar applications by retransmitting packets that are lost by the ISP. So if the ISP's network is lossy, and they count your retransmitted packets towards your monthly usage cap, who loses?
For this project you'll be required to take samples of typical IP traffic in and out of a host computer (e.g. using unix/FreeBSD tools such as tcpdump) and derive an estimate of real-world packet retransmission statistics. Evaluate how much data a consumer gets to successfully transfer at the application level (above TCP) before they hit the raw usage caps imposed by their ISP. Develop a commentary on the incentives an ISP might have (or not have) to reduce packet loss rates in their network.
Mapping online game player demographics
Under our GENIUS project we have been running some QuakeIII and Half-Life servers. Previous work with QuakeIII Arena has established that play of online interactive games such as QuakeIII and Half-Life tend to be cyclical over 24 hour periods, and dominated by players within 170ms of the game server's location on the Internet. Using regular Unix (FreeBSD) tools that we will supply, design and implement a software package that can track the traffic in/out of a game server's network link (e.g. sitting next to the server on a shared Ethernet hub) and (in real-time) trace the IP paths to each client (player). Your software should use techniques such as 'traceroute' or inbound TTL measurements to infer the number of IP 'hops' each player is from the server. Develop and document insights into the possible relationships between 'hop count', typical latency between player and server, and the frequency with which a player returns to a server. (You might base this tool on pkthisto or something similar.)
The business of free software licenses
The term 'free software' has many connotations and some specific legal implications depending on the license under which software is made 'free'. Compare the GNU Public License (GPL, under which Linux is released) with the "BSD" unix license (under which e.g. FreeBSD and some other free unix implementations are released). Explain the implications of each license for commercialization of derivative works. Assume you start an undergrad or postgrad research project that grows into a viable spin-out company, and yet at the beginning you started by building on existing 'free' software components. What are the implications for your new company's business model if you initially chose GPL'd software vs BSD (or vice-versa) ?
Price based Internet gateway
Many schemes have been proposed for price-based management of network traffic, where price is used as a signal to the user (or rather the user's application software) regarding the current load on network resources. This ideally allows the user application to adapt to network conditions in a way that optimises user satisfaction. In this project, a group of host machines will be connected to the Internet via a gateway, and all requests for remote server connection will be submitted via a pre-processor at the gateway. The gateway pre-processor and a special client on the host will negotiate regarding permission to connect. If the host agree to the current gateway conditions then the connection will be made to the remote server. The client software on the user's host machine is to provide an interface that allows the user to specify parameters that reflect the user's connection policy. The client then uses these parameters to negotiate each connection on behalf of the user.
Server failure detection and response
Assume you have a farm of N machines networked together on a common IP network (e.g. N < 20 and the machines are FreeBSD servers). Develop a distributed application that monitors the N machines and sends a pager or SMS message to one or more nominated phone numbers when a machine dies or is disconnected from the network. The monitoring mechanism must be self-contained within the set of N machines (no extra machine is available to run the monitoring program). The monitoring function must be robust against any machine failing. Each time a machine fails, the application adapts and continues operation across the remaining (N-1) machines. If a failed machine restarts, the application adapts again to resume monitoring the newly restarted machine.
Graceful shutdown of UPS-protected unix server farm
Assume a farm of N (N <=10) FreeBSD machines, and a single UPS that can be remotely monitored by one of the machines. All machines are powered through the UPS, but to save money we purchased a UPS that is only capable of supporting all N machines for five (5) minutes, or one primary machine for one (1) hour. Each machine is connected to a small, common IP network, also powered by the UPS. Develop a solution where the nominated primary machine monitors the UPS (e.g. over a dedicated RS232 link), and automatically initiates graceful shutdowns of the other (N-1) machines if mains power is lost. The solution should be configurable in terms of which machines make up the group, and allow for a hierarchy of shutdowns (e.g. some set of machines shutdown if power is gone for 2 minutes, another set of machines is shut down only if power outage lasts for 10 minutes, etc...)
Automatic rate limiting of online game cheats
Assume you are hosting an online game server (e.g. Quake3, Half-Life/CounterStrike) on a FreeBSD machine. Typically when a server operator decides a particular player is cheating, the player's IP address is "banned" and the client can no longer connect. The banned player quickly becomes aware of this and might try to work around the ban. For this project you must develop and implement an alternative solution - instead of outright banning of a cheater, use the dummynet driver in the FreeBSD kernel to add artificial latency (lag) and packet loss to the traffic going to and from the cheater's IP address. Other players should remain unaffected, and the cheater will have the frustrating experience of feeling as though their internet connection has suddenly become really bad. (FreeBSD is available free in the CAIA lab, and regular Linux game server binaries typically run as-is under FreeBSD.) Your project should implement a user-space frontend so that a game server operator can issue commands like "/lag <ipaddr>" to introduce penalty lag on a particular player.
VoIP Access Point and PBX setup
The aim in this project is to set up a wireless test bed where voice calls can be initiated. The wireless test bed will be configured in infrastructure mode which consists of a desktop PC acting as an access point (AP). Mobile stations (clients) are laptop or desktop PC equipped with wireless card. Furthermore, an open source Private Branch eXchange (PBX) called Asterisk will be installed in AP to enable voice calls.
Lawful Interception of the VOIP traffic
One of the key regulatory requirements of any publicly offered communications service is that, subject to judicial oversight, it be able to be intercepted. This project will survey the different approaches to intercepting VoIP traffic and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.
Modelling the two-player FPS game
One of the building blocks in developing traffic models of games with many players is the two-player game. This project will involve the statistical analysis of two-player game traffic generated by a server and transmitted to each player. We have conjectured that the state of the two player game (server to client) can be described in terms of client to server traffic. Some preliminary work analysing Quake 3 seems to support this conjecture but additional statistical analysis is needed to determine whether it is true or false and under what circumstances it is true or false.
Bit Torrent stealing bandwidth
BitTorrent is a popular protocol used to download large files over the Internet. Unlike traditional client/server models, BitTorrent is actually faster as the number of downloaders increase, as users participate in the download process by uploading portions of the file to other users. This project involves measuring the decrease in available throughput of other (interactive) applications when BitTorrent is sharing a home consumer link. This will also involve measuring the effects of bandwidth limiting the BitTorrent client as well as prioritising non-BitTorrent traffic.
Long projects
A business case for Australia as the world's backup server farm
With so much information now being stored digitally, disaster recovery plans require highly robust and reliable backup servers to hold sensitive information. Australia is geographically isolated, politically stable, has a technologically advanced telecommunications infrastructure, and is less than 300milliseconds from most well-connected places on the Internet. Develop a server farm solution that offers secure, offsite backup services to Northern Hemisphere companies and organizations. Identify the major requirements that must be met before such a business could be profitable (e.g. estimated running costs of a secure location, bandwidth in and out of Australia, TCP performance over long paths, etc) Your solution should support multiple independent customers, scale from gigabytes to terabytes per customer, and provide independent "24 by 7" secure access over the Internet. Make use of existing off-the-shelf TCP/IP based encryption and file transfer/sharing applications and techniques (e.g. open source unixes such as FreeBSD or Linux for file servers, IPsec encryption for tunneling between servers and customer sites, etc)
Latency and jitter sensitivity in First Person Shooter (FPS) games
For businesses planning on supporting fast-paced multiplayer games over the Internet the pool of potential customers depends on how tolerant players are to latency. Previous work with QuakeIII Arena suggests that players prefer servers less than 180-200ms away - i.e. paying customers will primarily come from the population within 180ms radius of any given server. This analysis was done using fairly crude estimates of 'ping' times between server and players (tens of samples per minute, using the server's uncalibrated timers). Develop a method for accurately sampling and estimating latency between client and server, build tools capable of monitoring at least two types of FPS (such as Half Life, CounterStrike, etc) , run public servers for a few months, then re-evaluate the validity of the "180ms radius" result. Comment on the possible impact of jitter, hop count, and game type on your results.
The war against Internet spam
The Internet is being flooded with unsolicited spam emails. It seems that until now there has not been an effective spam-stopping technique. This project aims to review anti-Spam state of the art methods. It will study existing/ proposed anti-spam mechanisms, and compare and evaluate their effectiveness. Its scope may be extended to a study of spam email traffic characterisation and an investigation of a spam email detection technique, that is capable of detecting spam traffic solely from the dynamic characteristics the traffic imposes on the network.
A study of hidden Internet traffic
There are various reasons for Internet application developers and users to hide their traffic. The common approach used is traffic encryption e.g. encrypted VoIP and encrypted P2P traffic. This makes it harder for network operators to identify these types of traffic using traditional traffic classification techniques such as TCP/UDP port based or payload based protocol reconstruction. The aim of this project is to study the basic packet/flow traffic patterns (e.g. packet length and inter-packet arrival time distributions) of these Internet applications. Its scope can be extended to develop a method for identifying such traffic solely from the dynamic traffic characteristics exhibit at the network layer.
Bit Torrent fairness
BitTorrent is a popular protocol used to download large files over the Internet. Unlike traditional client/server models, BitTorrent is actually faster as the number of downloaders increase, as users participate in the download process by uploading portions of the file to other users. This project involves a comparison of a number of concurrent BitTorrent clients at the ends of different download pipes (eg. 1.5Mb/s and 512kbps) and to compare the fairness of the download protocol - does the lower bandwidth client get a fair share of download capacity and do all clients fairly contribute to uploads?
Fluid flow modelling of game traffic
Although Markov Chain models of game traffic capture the correlated nature of First Person Shooter game traffic, they do have some limitations. In particular they are less accurate at modelling correlation between large packets than smaller packets. They also involve significant binning of the data to make analysis tractable. A fluid flow model removes the need for binning data and is likely to be more accurate in predicting autocorrelation of large packets. This project would involve the development of fluid flow models of popular FPS games and the development of fluid flow models in Omnet++ and ns2 simulation systems.
Fundamental assumptions of game traffic analysis
In our analysis of game traffic we have made a fundamental assumption that each player's behaviour causes server traffic to be generated that is independent of, and identically distributed to, that of other players (i.i.d). This assumption has been very successful in understanding the behaviour of game traffic as the number of players increases, but what are its limits? It seems to work in FPS games, including team games which might be expected to not be i.i.d., but does the assumption of i.i.d hold for other game genres? How might it be supported or tested? This project will involve considerable statistical analysis of game traffic to test the assumption of i.i.d.
Internet Lawful interception system
This project will further develop a prototype lawful interception system for IP traffic that integrates mechanisms for ensuring that data captured and reported has not been tampered with.
Packet loss and bit error characteristics and delay variation over 802.11b wireless links
Wireless links in 802.11b WLAN are prone to significant bit errors and thus packet losses due to channel noise and interference, and packet collision. To deal with these problems, special techniques such as Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) are commonly used. These techniques change the bit error pattern at the link layer and the packet loss pattern at the transport layer, and introduce delay variation over wireless links. In this project, we would like to reveal how the packet loss pattern observed by upper layer protocols (such as TCP) is related to the bit error pattern at the link layer and discover the correlation between packet losses and delay variation over 802.11b wireless links.
Using network measurement tools to estimate the traffic load between Australia and the rest of the world
It is of great interest to ISPs to configure and manage their networks in an efficient way and facilitate the efficient use of network bandwidth for Internet traffic. Although the traditional measurement tools such as ping, traceroute and ttcp have been used with great success, they do not measure advanced performance metrics, such as bandwidth capacity, available bandwidth or bottleneck location across a routing path. In this project, we propose the use of the best-current-practice network measurement tools to measure these advanced network performance metrics on the Internet routing paths between Australia and the outside world (i.e., Asia, Europe and America).
VoIP traffic measurement and other traffic interactions
VoIP is an important application in the current and future wireless network. This project involves measuring voice capacity supporting by the IEEE 802.11 protocol in a wireless LAN network. Detail characteristics (such as collision probability, delay and packet loss rate), as well as interaction between voice and other traffic over the wireless channel will also be studied.
VoIP security
IP-based telephony systems have many features that are not economically feasible in the traditional voice communication networks (PSTN). However, this sophistication brings additional vulnerabilities in term of security that must be addressed. This project will look at security issues (such as denied service attacks, authentication, spam, etc.) and suggest possible solutions for security problems in voice communication over wireless LAN networks.
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