I'm looking for students with strong interests in understanding practical networking problems, especially concerning large-scale aspects of the Internet. The requirements for considering doing a project with me is the knowledge of one or more of the following: (1) common programming languages used to analyze data (C, Perl, Awk, other scripting languages), (2) experience in development on mobile phones (Android/Apple), (3) machine learning algorithms, and (4) advanced knowledge in network virtualization or routing.

Example topics

Network virtualization/SDN

• SDN scalability: The goal of this project is test the scalability of the SDN controllers, by setting up experiments that rely on as many controllers as possible on PlanetLab.

Cloud – content delivery - DNS

• Content cartography: This project consists in running DNS measurements towards targeted domains and analyzing the answers to get a picture of the corresponding infrastructure.

• Tracking Cloud performance: The Cloud enables deploying distributed applications on-demand. However, having an accurate picture of the performance that Cloud-based applications deliver is challenging. In this project, you will monitor the performance of a Cloud-enabled application from the PlanetLab platform.

Internet measurements

• P2P measurements: This project consists of extending the Vuze P2P ONO plugin, see http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=ono. The plugin is written in Java and allows to perform traceroutes and DNS queries from P2P clients.

• Chrome Packaged Apps: Google Chrome provides an API to program apps outside the browser that behave like native apps but are as safe as browser apps, and much more powerful than Web apps. Programming a packaged app is similar to HTML5/javascript/CSS, so relatively straightforward. For more details about the API, see http://developer.chrome.com/apps/about_apps.html.

• Javascript/HTML5 measurements: JavaScript/HTML5 are very versatile languages, especially for web developers. Recently, javascript has also been used to carry out network measurements. In this project, you will extend existing tools that perform various network measurements, e.g., delay, throughput, DNS latency. See: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/14/analyzing-network-characteristics-using-javascript-and-the-dom-part-1/

Mobile devices

• App/Cloud interactions: In this project, you will select one or multiple mobile applications, and monitor their interactions with remote servers in the Internet, to understand the complexity of the interactions between mobile apps and the Cloud.

• Network stack of Android/Apple devices: In this project, you will study the source code of mobile devices (Android/Apple) and provide guidelines to write applications that monitor the usage of the network by applications running on the mobile devices.

• Privacy of mobile devices: In this project, you will study different strategies to keep the data of users private while interacting with Internet applications interested in leveraging information from the end-user. You will choose a specific mobile platform and Internet applications.

Sample of past M.Sc. projects:

• Olabode Fatona (2013): Software-defined networking

• Agha Rameez (2013): Analysis of IP address space usage by mobile users

• Stefanos Moukarikas (2013): Demonstration of Software Defined Networking using the Floodlight SDN controller

• Syed Muhammad Zaki Haider (2012): Data plane testing of the Junosphere platform

• Ilhame HUSSAIN (2012): Online social Networking

• Fahd Mujahid Khan (2012): LTE virtualization

• Muhammad Raihan Khan (2012): Geographical location and Distance Distribution of Content Delivery Infrastructures

• Mahesh Kumar (2012): Geolocation of content delivery infrastructure

• Asif Mahmood (2012): Android Privacy Monitoring and Protection

• Muhammad Khalid Malik (2012): Evolution to 4G: Integratiob of Gigabit optical networks for high-speed broadband.

• Harris Mallick (2012): Performance Comparison of MPLS and Non-MPLS Backhaul Networks

• Subin Abraham Mathew (2012): TOGETHER: TOpology GEneration THrough HEuRistics

• Nourin Mazhar (2012): An Empirical Evaluation of Data Service in a Multi-Vendor GSM Radio Network

• Nacer Naciri Ghoumari (2012): Planning and dimensioning of mobile equipment deployment: the case of the region of Settat

• Samuel Ikechukwu Onyeka Uzonwa (2012): Analysis of Web Content Delivery Ecosystem in Nigeria

• Qing Zhu (2012): Scalability testing of the Junosphere platform

• Roman Golovatenko (2011): Compressibility of forwarding tables in the Internet.

• Mohd. Mussadiq Jalalzai (2010, now at Kabul University): Interoperability tests with the Quagga open-source router.

• O.E. Okonor (2008): Impact of different IPv6 prefix allocation schemes on Internet scalability.

• S. Siwpersad (2007, owner of suXus hosting and networks): Geolocation of Internet hosts, an investigation of the coherence between databases and measurements.

• Nicolas Fournier (2005, now at Cisco systems): Impact of changing the order of the BGP decision process rules on intradomain traffic.

• Jean-Francois Paque (2005, now at L'Oreal): Outbound traffic engineering with the Border Gateway Protocol.

• Stefano Iasi (2005, now at Cisco systems): Multi-area intra-domain routing: Simulation study of the OSPF protocol and its implications on the design of multi-area architecture.

• Maxime Thiry (2003): Visualization of Internet traffic.

• Vincent Magnin (2003, now at UNIL): A study of the topological characteristics of Internet traffic.