Topics

These are some of the topics available for a special assignment. If you are interested in a topic, contact its instructor by email (name is email link below). 

Check also CSE Playroom wiki and list of available equipment and think what you would like to do with them, and then suggest your own topic for the professors!

 

Topics by Jukka K. Nurminen

Internet of Things demo with Arduino (reserved)

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

The purpose of this special assignment is to build a demo that uses the communication possibilities (e.g. USB, Ethernet, BT, ZigBee, Android phone connectivity with ADK) of the Arduino platform. A parallel goal is to learn what kind of possibilities the Arduino platform provides for Internet of Things experimentation. The target is that the demo will be installed to the playroom or other suitable location in our labs premises. This special assignment has a lot of room for creativity because the only key requirement is that the demo should do something interesting and impressive.

References:

1. http://www.arduino.cc/
2. http://www.circuitsathome.com/
3. http://pervasive297.wikispaces.com/arduino 

Is Binary XML ready for WSN applications?

Description:

Binary XML refers to any specification which defines the compact representation of XML (Extensible Markup Language) in a binary format. Using a binary XML format generally reduces the verbosity of XML  ocuments and cost of parsing. Binary XML is typically used in applications where standard XML is not an option due to performance limitations. Other advantages may include enabling random access and indexing of XML documents.

Up to now, there are several standard frameworks proposed by different standard organizations. None of them have been widely adopted yet. This work will survey these solutions and evaluate their maturity and performance for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications.

Expectation:

The comparative analysis report will provide comprehensive studies over selected binary XML solutions based on the identified WSN applications. Significant factors and criteria should be defined to provide a generic evaluation framework. The report should include diagrams, charts and tables to illustrate the structure of each solution and its state progress.
Additional information:
No programming is required. In addition to the literature study, the student should try some existing reference implementations of the selected binary XML standards to gain a close look and hands-on experience.

References:
1. Fast infoset: a standard published by ISO/IEC and ITU-T https://fi.dev.java.net/standardization.html
2. Efficient XML Interchange (EXI): W3C Standard http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/
3. Wireless Binary XML (WBXML): Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standard to allow XML documents to be transmitted in a compact manner over mobile networks http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/affiliates/LicenseAgreement.asp?DocName=/wap/wap-192-wbxml-20010725-a.pdf
4. Binary MPEG format for XML (BiM): ISO/IEC 23001-1, used by many ETSI standards for Digital TV and Mobile TV. http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/technologies/mpb-bim/index.htm
5. Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML) from Matroska http://ebml.sourceforge.net/
6. Binary Extensible Markup Language (BXML): Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) binary XML encoding specification optimized for geo-related data (GML) http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=13636

 

Topics by Andrey Lukyanenko 

1. Incentives in information centric-networking (ICN).

Description: ICN a new clean-slate redesign of the Internet, however it needs to fight out it place in current world.  As everything new requires strong incentives for adaptation here it is required to study how well the "old" Internet  incentives are transferred to the new world of ICN. Who of the Internet players benefit from it and how, and who will  lose. A good result for this topic will be a model with many parties of the Internet involved.

2. Application of information centric-networking (ICN) in today's Internet.

Description:  ICN a new clean-slate redesign of the Internet. It is generally guessed that ICN will benefit many parties  and application, but it is remain unclear "how exactly some application will benefit?". This work is to say how particular  such general popular network applications as "social networking", "mobility" and "destruction-tolerant networks" will  benefit from ICN. What exactly should be form of interaction of applications with ICN.

3. Implementation of generic TCP protocol in user-space.

Description: TCP protocol that will take best parts of different existing implementations.  It will just based on our parameters choose form of one of the known protocols based on our parameters. It even can be  implemented in userspace and work over UDP or directly form IP packets, the main part is that we can easily adjust it and  switch from one version to another. The implementation will also benefit from implementation on a phone  (Android or Windows Phone 7.1 and up).
Skills: Programming (C++, C# or Java).

Topics by Deng Yang

Implementation of Multicast Listener Discovery(MLD) in constrained devices

Background:
As more and more researchers agree that constrained devices should use IPv6 to communicate with each other in the future era of Internet of Things and the applications that require one-to-many interactions are emerging, for example home/industrial automation,  smart building and etc, IPv6 multicast could become an effective way due to its energy-efficiency comparing to using unicast many times. Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) is the first step of IP multicast but right now an implementation of MLD in constrained devices is still missing and that is the motivation of this special assignment.
Task:
Even though RFC 2710, RFC 3810 and RFC 4604 are MLD-related protocols, the main task is to implement RFC 2710 in constrained devices at first as it is relative simple but still keeps compatible with the other two RFCs. The implementation is going to done in Contiki operation system, which is written in C and is very popular in IoT research field. To start with, a simulation tool is going to be used in development phase and after the code is completed and runs well in simulation environment a real device (Z1) will be adopted.
Requisites:
The student should know basic knowledge about IPv6 networks and has programmed in Linux using C language. Also, understanding the basic Makefile is a plus.
Additional information:
This special assignment is quite good for those students who want to improve their programming skills and increase their project experience greatly. And also, some Contiki tutorial including understanding Contiki architecture as well as using Cooja simulation tool could be given if necessary.
References:
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2710
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3810
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4604
[4] http://www.contiki-os.org/

Topics by Mario Di Francesco

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, and try to access the channel at the same time. 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.

Storage and visualization in 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 stored so that it can be conveniently accessed and visualized. This is especially important for heterogeneous and multimedia data, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent applications. In this context, HTML5 is an effective and mobile device-friendly technology very suitable to develop rich IoT applications.

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

Topics by Miika Komu

Thread-safe library of CoAP

Constrained Application Protocol [1] is used for machine-to-machine communications in sensor networks. While the protocol operates on top of UDP, it conforms to RESTful architectures, thus making it straightforward to map translate to HTTP requests at a proxy. This way, sensor devices can be connected to the web in scalable way. Alternatively, the devices can be controlled directly using the CoAP protocol itself.

In this special assignment, the student modifies the libCoAP library [2] to make it thread safe. The purpose of this task to support regression testing of library in order to understand scalability issues at proxies or back-end side. The student should be familiar with C language and concurrent programming to complete this task.

References:

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-core-coap-13

[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/libcoap/

Network Application Frameworks

Network application frameworks make developer's life easier by hiding complexity of the low-level APIs. However, existing frameworks could be improved to handle, for instance, IPv6 better. The goal of this work is to implement and contribute a number of improvements to such frameworks [1]. The amount of work of can be adjusted according to the need of students, e.g., the student can choose the framework (Boost::Asio, ACE, java.net and Twisted) and the issues to fix. For instance, the ACE development community welcomed the improvements [2].

References:

[1] http://nw.dreamhosters.com/ols/ols2012/ols2012-komu.pdf

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.soft-sys.ace/NOxoDISz8M0

Web-based Course Reservation System (reserved)

Laboratory works and a number of other  courses are using an online reservation system for students to book assistant time.This special assignment involves improving to current implementation. For instance, the dependency to Doodle should be eliminated.