Elective in Computer Networks II - Section 1
Models and methods for fully decentralized and ad-hoc networks

Teacher: Luca Becchetti

 

Syllabus
 

The trend towards wireless communication affects more and more electronic devices in almost every sphere of life. Conventional  networks rely on base stations, and the mobile devices exchange the data in a star-like fashion. In contrast, current research is mainly focused on networks that are completely unstructured, but are nevertheless able to communicate (via several hops), despite the low coverage of their antennas. A prominent example is that of networks consisting of thousands of tiny computers, equipped with sensors,  which might be used  to monitor activities of interest: traffic in a city, ground humidity in agricolture, evidence of a possible vulcano explosion. These networks are self-organized and the standard paradigms for routing, disseminating information and processing information have to be revisited. The goal of this course  is to provide an overview of the most relevant aspects and research directions in the area.

Topics

Material

Textbook
[T] R.Wattenhofer F. Kuhn. Principles of distributed computing. Free download  (thanks to the authors!), available at

http://dcg.ethz.ch/lectures/podc_allstars/lecture/podc.pdf

Other references
Parts covered in this course (tentative list):
Slides
Course slides and other references are available at http://dcg.ethz.ch/lectures/podc_allstars/index.html
Other slides that were used by the instructor:
Notes: 1. The above slides contain snapshots from Wattenhofer and Kuhn's textbook. These are simply the texts of some propositions given in the textbook; 2. Slides are necessarily succint and are mainly intended as a reference for the instructor. As such, they may contain errors and inconsistencies. Using them to prepare the exam is strongly discouraged.

Netlogo
Netlogo's web site and download page is here: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Here you can also find the user manual. Tutorials are available here
Exam

Students have to take a written exam and have to present a project.

Written Exam
The written exam will consist of  2 or 3 assignments.

Project
Students should participate to a project. The project will consist in an assignment in which a group of maximum two students will cooperate to performa simulation study (using Netlogo) on a topic of choice (mostly but not necessarily among those considered during the course), previously agreed with the instructor. The outcome of the project will consist in i) the Netlogo code produced to perform the experiments; ii) the data (statistics) produced during the experiments; iii) a technical report describing the work done and the results obtained. The technical report should have the form of a conference paper. It should be between 4 and 5 pages long and follow the ACM SIGs proceedings format. Word and LateX templates are available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates#aL.
In particular, the report should contain an introduction, a section describing the experimental setting (the dataset, the problem studied, the performance indices considered etc.), one section describing and commenting on the results obtained and a conclusion section, highlighting significant aspects (positive or negative) of the results you obtained, and pointing to directions that in your opinion deserve further investigation.  The introduction should provide an overview of the problem studied, the methods/approach used and the result obtained. It should also point to and comment some key references on the topic (e.g., the main papers in which the approach you are using was proposed/used before).
It is expected that you devote some effort to the writeup of the technical report. The way you present the material is important. Your report should help me understand what you have done, the critical decisions you hade to take etc. Reading or simply browsing some well-written scientific paper will definitely help you improve the presentation. To this purpose, a good idea is reading the suggested references listed above!

Tools
You are expected to perform simulations of some of the algorithms you saw during the course using Netlogo simulation tool. Netlogo is one of the most prominent agent-based simulation tools. It is freely available at Northwestern University's Web site for download. On the Web site, you also have access to other resources, such as manuals and tutorials.

Grades
Each student will receive at most 20 points for the written exam and at most 10 for the project.

Forming a group
Please contact me by email to notify the names of the members of your team and receive your assignment. You can propose a topic you liked and I will try to assign a related project to you.

Discussing your project
Each student should arrange an appointment and discuss the project s/he participated in before taking part to the written exam. Before that, I should receive by email (at least 3 days before the appointment) a pdf copy of the report describing your work. This means that I should receive this before any participant to a group discusses his/her project with me.