1. CPSC 641: Project Brainstorming
Carey Williamson
Department of Computer Science
University of Calgary
Winter 2018

2. Course Project Overview
A “typical” course project might involve:
choosing a topic and perf eval methodology
designing/building appropriate testbed, environment, or platform for your project
extend/customize system as needed
obtain relevant data/measurements needed
design suitable experiment: clear goal, identify factors, levels, performance metrics
obtain and describe (new/interesting) results

3. Project Timeline By Tuesday, February 27: By Monday, April 16:
One-page project proposal (not marked)
Issues: uniqueness, relevance, fit, scale, data
By Monday, April 16:
Submit page research paper (hardcopy)
Worth 50% of your grade in CPSC 641
Eval: problem statement, lit review, method, results, writing style, originality, difficulty, etc.

4. Examples of Past Projects
Benchmarking dynamic Web content generation
Web browsing over wireless/mobile networks
Traffic classification using machine learning
Temporal locality in multimedia workloads
WWW2007 Web workload characterization
Benchmarking modern Web browsers
Probabilistic key distribution in WSNs
Measurements and analysis of IP-TV
Characterizing performance of multi-core Web servers
Peer-assisted video streaming

5. Possible Project Ideas
Wavelet-based traffic modeling/forecasting
DASH-based video streaming
Multi-path TCP (MPTCP) performance
Wavelength assignment in WDM optical networks
Energy efficient routing in WSNs
Office 365 traffic characterization
DNS-based attacks on U of C network
HTTP/2.0 deployment and performance
D2L caching and/or content acceleration
Design and performance of Netflix CDN
PyeongChang 2018 video streaming traffic
Social network analysis and visualization

6. Experimental Equipment
Rack-mounted clients and servers
Several routers and switches
WiMAX modem
Web proxy caching appliance
Wireless laptops, PDAs, and APs
Wireless network analyzers
Gigabit Ethernet LAN analyzer
Wireless video cameras
Wireless sensor motes
Access to SAVI national testbed for SDN

7. Some Available Simulators
ns-2 network simulator (TCP packet level)
ns-3 network simulator
OMNET++ simulator
Web proxy caching simulator
ATM-TN simulator (ATM cell-level)
IP-TN simulator (U of C)
IP-TNE network emulator (U of C)
Mininet network emulator
Speed scaling simulator

8. Some Useful Software Tools
Synthetic Web proxy workload generation
Web client traffic model (mosaic, 1995)
LRD traffic analysis (R/S, V-T, AC, etc)
GUI for traffic modeling/analysis (synTraff)
Wavelet-based traffic model (MWM)
Synthetic MPEG video trace generation
GISMO (Generator for Internet Streaming Media Objects)
BRITE Internet Topology Emulator
netalyzr tool for benchmarking network paths
tcpanaly tool for TCP trace analysis

9. Public Traces and Data Sets
CRAWDAD: Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data at Dartmouth (crawdad.cs.dartmouth.edu)
CAIDA: Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (
Internet Traffic Archive (ita.ee.lbl.gov)
Bellcore Ethernet LAN trace (1989)
LBL TCP/IP packet traces (1990)
Web server access logs (1996)

10. Local U of C Datasets
Connection-level summary logs for U of C inbound/outbound Internet traffic (hourly/daily/monthly for 10+ years)
UcalgaryBlogs Web server access log
Carey’s archives (3 years of data)

11. Dataset #1: UCalgaryBlogs Web Server
What: about 16 months of Web server access log data from UCalgaryBlogs Web server (1 GB .gz file)
Objective: characterization of Web site usage
Possible analyses:
Which of the hosted Web sites get the most activity?
Popularity analysis (URL based, Zipf-like distributions)
Traffic analysis (volume, time of day, day of week, sizes)
Longitudinal analysis (growth trends, seasonal effects)
Geographical analysis (IP geolocation of Web clients)
Security analysis (denial of service attacks)
D2L analysis (logout activity)

12. Example: Data Format
[24/Jan/2016:03:15: ] "GET /2013/03/04/krazy-kats-remarkably-changing-dynamics/ HTTP/1.1" 200
8054 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/ (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/ Safari/537.36"
[24/Jan/2016:03:15: ] "GET /2013/04/24/manga-vs-comics-another-perspective/ HTTP/1.1"
"-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/ (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/ Safari/537.36"
[24/Jan/2016:03:15: ] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" "
php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; 125LA; .NET CLR ; .NET CLR ; .NET CLR 3.5.
21022)"
[24/Jan/2016:03:15: ] "POST /wp-signup.php HTTP/1.0" "
p.php?action=register" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) Presto/ Version/12.17"
[24/Jan/2016:03:15: ] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" "
[24/Jan/2016:03:15: ] "GET /2013/02/27/why-the-web-slinger/ HTTP/1.1" "-" "Mozilla/5.
0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/ (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/ Safari/537.36"
[24/Jan/2016:03:15: ] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" "

13. Dataset #2: Email Archive
What: about 3 years of “sent-mail” archive (1 GB) recorded by the pine mail reading client on Linux
Objective: characterization of usage
Possible analyses:
“The Chronicles: A Year in the Life of a CPSC Head”
Workload characterization (volume, size, attachments)
Temporal analysis of usage (date timestamps)
Topical analysis (subject header for theme river analysis)
Social network analysis (CPSC, FoS, UofC, research, etc)
Seasonal analysis (spiral model a la Charles Perrin)
Note: Confidentiality agreement would be required before working with this data

14. Example: Metadata Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2015 11:50:14 -0700 (MST)
From: Carey Williamson
To: Ken Barker
Subject: Re: What to include in the Executive Summary?
Date: Thu, 1 Jan :54: (MST)
Subject: Re: Unit Reviewers
Date: Fri, 2 Jan :57: (MST)
To: Niklas Carlsson
Subject: Re: Happy New Year 2015
Date: Fri, 2 Jan :28: (MST)
To: Carey Williamson
Subject: [Hiring-cpsc-l] CRC Advertisements for Revision (fwd)
Date: Tue, 1 Oct :50:05
From: Erin Moloney
To:
Subject: [Hiring-cpsc-l] CRC Advertisements for Revision