• ScatterWeb
• DES-Testbed
• FeuerWhere
• OPNEX
• Gallery

Quick Links --- M.Sc. / B.Sc. Theses Current Lectures --- University Homepage Department Homepage Institute Homepage

Proseminar Technische Informatik

Lecturer:	Georg Wittenburg, u.a.
Office Hours:	n.V.
Location:	K60
Time:	Vorbesprechung: Dienstag, 13.10.2009, 13:00 Uhr (c.t.) Zwischenbesprechung: Dienstag, 3.11.2009, 13:00 Uhr (c.t.) Blockseminar: Donnerstag, 28.1.2010, 10:00 - 18:00 Uhr (s.t.), Freitag, 29.1.2010, 10:00 - 18:00 Uhr (s.t.)
ECTS Credits:	3 (2 SWS)
Links:	KVV Mailing List

Content

The Proseminar Technische Informatik expands on other Bachelor-level lectures with focus on technical computer science. Students pick a topic related to current technology and/or partially covered in the previous lectures and write a report (12 A4 pages including figures and references, single column, 1.5 spacing, 11-point font) discussing corresponding questions. At the end of the term, the participants present their results in the form a short talk (20 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A) in a meeting. This course places special emphasis on dealing competently with academic and primary literature, structure and legibility of the report, and the style of the presentation (50% of final grade). During the term, there will be deadlines for status reports, but no weekly meetings of the complete seminar group.

Schedule

• 13.10.2009:
  • Organizational Meeting - 13:00 Uhr (c.t.), Raum K60
  • Read the literature linked below.
• 16.10.2009:
  • Last day to choose a topic via e-mail to Georg Wittenburg.
• 3.11.2009:
  • Organizational Meeting - 13:00 Uhr (c.t.), Raum K60
  • Bring your preliminary outline for review.
• 6.11.2009:
  • Hand in a preliminary outline and reference list to your advisor via e-mail.
• 15.1.2010:
  • Final version of your report must be handed in to your advisor and Georg Wittenburg via e-mail.
• 22.1.2010:
  • Final version of your slides must be handed in to your advisor and Georg Wittenburg via e-mail.
• 28./29.1.2010:
  • The seminar will take place. Attendance is mandatory.

Attention: Students have to meet all deadlines listed in the timetable. Otherwise, she/he will lose the right to take part in the final presentation.

The talks will be given according to this schedule:

Topics

Advisor: Stephan Adler

Security in RFID Systems
In the last years the usage of RFID (Radio-frequency identification) based payment, identification and security applications became common in our everyday life. Students pay their meals the cafeteria and university staff is using RFID systems to lock their rooms. Even passports contain RFID chips today. The task is to evaluate the different types of RFID systems from an security perspective. 1. How do the systems prevent data manipulation? 2. How is the data protected from unauthorized access?
Assigned to: Nico von Geyso (no report)

Advisor: Michael Baar

Elektrophorese
Erläutern Sie das Verfahren der Elektrophorese und deren Einsatz in Unterhaltungselektronik. Geben Sie dazu einen Überblick über den Herstellungstellungsprozess von elektronischem Papier. Eine mögliche Quelle als Einstieg ist http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6690/pdf/394253a0.pdf, weitere sind selbst zu recherchieren.
Assigned to: Martin Lenders (report, slides)

Advisor: Bastian Blywis

Diode and LCD Technology Advances
Most of our gadgets provide some kind of visual feedback to the user: either by LEDs or LCD displays. The task of this report is to give an overview of the advances in the last decades. Starting from nixie tubes, LEDs, OLEDs, and laser diodes shall be covered. In addition to the diodes, LCD and TFT-LCD are to be discussed. Elaborate how diodes and liquid crystal displays work, discuss their differences and advantages.
Assigned to: Benjamin Aschenbrenner (report, slides)

Alternative Transport Layer Protocols
The lecture "operating and communication systems" gives an insight in layered protocol architectures. TCP and UDP are the dominant transport layer protocols that you should already know. Besides these two protocols there are some alternative that try to solve issues that can arise in modern networks and with novel applications. SCTP, DCCP, and CUDP are just some examples. Discuss the alternatives to TCP and UDP, the problems they try to solve, the particular application scenarios, and their differences.
Assigned to: Christian Mehlis (report, slides)

Advisor: Norman Dziengel

FTIR, ORB, CAP and Arty
New input devices seem to arise at the horizon of input devices. Find current projects researching on modern and improvement promising devices and compare them to the well known and established mice and touchpad. Analyze the requirements of computer users concerning the input device and assess the state of the art. Compare those requirements with the upcoming technologies as well as mice and touchpad. Provide an insight of the determined technologies and evaluate the likelihood of deployment as well as the benefit for the user.
Assigned to: Christian Schmiedl (report, slides)

Advisor: Thomas Hillebrandt

Simulatoren für drahtlose Netzwerke
Die Entwicklung von Netzwerkprotokollen ist eine komplexe und zeitaufwändige Aufgabe. In diesem Prozess benötigen Forscher und Entwickler ein Modell des Netzwerkes, welches die reale Umgebung spiegelt, da Tests in realen Netzwerken u.U. schwierig, kostenintensiv und zeitaufwändig sind. Diese Aufgabe übernehmen Netzwerk-Simulatoren. Ziel dieser Arbeit soll es sein, eine Einführung in das Gebiet der Netzwerksimulation zu geben, einige verbreitete Simulatoren für drahtlose Netzwerke vorzustellen (Stärken und Schwächen) und abschließend zu beurteilen, inwiefern sich diese Werkzeuge für die Analyse und Entwicklung von Netzwerkprotokollen im Vergleich zu Tests in realen Netzen eignen. Vergleichen Sie die Simulatoren anhand von einheitlichen Bewertungskriterien und sprechen Sie Empfehlungen aus.
Assigned to: Mateusz Khalil (report, slides)

Advisor: Zakaria Kasmi

Positionsbestimmung in Gebäuden
Die Positionsbestimmung in Gebäuden bzw. in überbauten Arealen (Indoor-Positionierung) gewinnt mehr und mehr an Bedeutung. Der Grund für die wachsende Nachfrage nach Möglichkeiten der Indoor-Ortung liegt in den rasanten Entwicklungen der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien in den letzten Jahren. Dies hat zum Aufkommen neuer (mobiler) Anwendungen und Dienste geführt, bei denen die Lokalisierung eine entscheidende Rolle spielt. Nach einer kürzen Einführung in Indoor-Positionierung sollen, die im Markt vorhandenen Positionierungssysteme vorgestellt und deren Eigenschaften (Auflösung, Reichweite, verwendete Bandbreite, ...) genannt werden.
Assigned to: Michael Schmidt (report, slides)

Advisor: Pardeep Kumar

MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks
A medium access control (MAC) protocol generally regulates the access of devices to a shared medium. In case of a wireless sensor network (WSN), which has very limited resources, a MAC protocol is also responsible to create energy-efficient links between nodes, where messages can be sent to the sink node in a timely manner. Most of MAC protocols proposed for WSNs are targeted only for the single main objective to conserve energy. Other parameters such as timeliness, adaptation to traffic conditions, scalability and packet delivery ratio are mostly ignored or dealt as secondary objectives. The demand to address those issues increases with the growing interest in cheap, low-power, low-distance, and embedded WSNs. The goal of this work is to discuss state of the art MAC protocols and to analyze how they trade-off for different parameters, especially for energy-efficiency and timeliness factors.
Assigned to: Hans-Christian Halfbrodt (report, slides)

Advisor: Marcel Kyas

Home-Theatre PC
Provide a bill of materials for a home theatre PC. The system should be able to display high-definition content and encode one high-definition stream or two standard-definition streams. Discuss the different components and optimise the performance/power ratio. Investigate under which conditions the trade-off between high initial cost and low power consumption is worthwhile. Which platform do You believe is suited best?
Assigned to: Marc Simons (report, slides)

Static analysis of embedded software
Static analysis tools are used in many domains to improve the quality of software. Tools like LINT and SPARSE detect common errors and deviations from coding standards in C programs. Find out which other tools we find on the market for this purpose and whether these tools are suitable for the analysis of embedded or concurrent software. What properties are of interest for these tools?
Assigned to: Konrad Reiche (report, slides)

Advisor: Tomasz Naumowicz (Reports should be written in English.)

E-book readers in the open source community
Introduction of Amazon Kindle, Sony PSR, iRex iLiad and other e-book reader devices inspired many open source developers to build a common software platform for this class of devices. Present current solutions from the closed and open source field, summarize their commons and differences. Discuss which platform would you select if you were about to build a new e-book reader device.
Assigned to: Zoran Resanovic (report, slides)

Advisor: Philipp Reinecke

SOA-Testbeds: An Overview
Service-Orientation has become a new paradigm in system development. By decoupling components and hiding functionality behind well-defined interfaces, service-oriented systems provide users and developers with increased ease-of-use, flexibility, and fault-tolerance. In order to study these systems in realistic usage scenarios, test-beds are required. Ideally, test-beds should allow the injection of faults and failures of various types as well as provide ways of observing relevant attributes of the system's quality of service. Your task is to develop an overview of existing SOA test-beds. You are expected to derive requirements and desiderata for a test-bed and use them as the basis for an informed discussion of existing approaches.
Assigned to: Jakub Ludma (no report)

Archived Failure Data
Failure data is an indispensable tool in the modelling and evaluation of systems. There exist a number of archives that contain failure data for research proposes. Provide an overview of failure data archives, discussing important aspects such as type of system considered, type of data, volume of data, quality of data, level of detail, and so on.
Assigned to: Stefan Friesel (no report)

Advisor: Matthias Wählisch

Why the Internet Sucks: A Core Perspective
The current Internet routing and addressing architecture is facing challenges in scalability, mobility, multi-homing, and inter-domain traffic engineering. A major problem brings the tremendous increase of routing table sizes in the Internet core (the default-free zone): On the one hand there is the demand for multi-homed and provider-independent addresses to improve flexibility, performance and reliability, which avoids straightforward address aggregation on the other hand. The goal of the work is to discuss this area of conflict within the core Internet routing architecture. The starting point is a recently published paper by Jen et al. that gives a very good introduction to this intricate topic.
Assigned to: Yves Müller (report, slides)

You are Skyping - But How Does it Work!?
Skype is a popular software that allows text, voice and more recently video chat. It seems easy to use and promise an appropriate performance, but how does it overcome the current problems of the Internet (e.g. NAT and firewalls). The goal of this work is the analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet voice/video protocol based on published literature or (in addition) own experiments.
Assigned to: Robert Fehrmann (report, slides)

Beyond Music File Sharing: A Technical Introduction to P2P Networks
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are widely deployed in the current Internet. They provide end users with a high flexibility to deploy new services without relying on dedicated infrastructure components. This work should introduce the principle ideas of P2P networks and draw a comparison between the P2P and client-server paradigm.
Assigned to: Christian Cikryt (report, slides)

Reactive vs. Proactive State Maintenance
There are basically two mechanisms to maintain protocol states: reactive and proactive. Both approaches have their own pros and cons depending on the application scenario. The goal of this work is the clear discussion of proactive and reactive state maintenance. Additionally, the outcome should be illustrated on a concrete example, e.g., handling churn in P2P networks.
Assigned to: Jonas Dohse (no report)

Experimenting in the Internet: Internet Labs
The Internet is an evolving network in which new mechanisms will be deployed continuously. Novel protocols, however, should require a serious and realistic analysis before they change from ideas to daily used services. Simulations as well as analytical work have their limitations. The goal of this topic is the presentation and critical discussion of two common Internet laboratories (PlanetLab and G-Lab), which promise a global, large-scale test environment.
Assigned to: Sebastian Raitza (no report)

Homegateways - Ready for the current and future Internet?
Homegateways establish a connection between homenetworks and the internet. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the principle ideas of homegateways as well as to analyze occurring problems. As it seems likely that Homegateways will have to handle even more internet services in the future, additional problems can be expected and will also be dealt with in this work.
Assigned to: Johannes Klick (report, slides)

Advisor: Heiko Will

Georouting
Most common routing algorithms use metrics like hop-count and receiver strength indicator (RSSI). With the extensive use of positioning systems like GPS, other routing metrics or even metric free algorithms where developed. Routing algorithms which make use of geographical positions or information are summarized under the term of "georouting". You should present a survey of the state of art in georouting and discuss some approaches. Which are the difficulties in theory and praxis? Discuss approaches to solve this issues.
Assigned to: Jakob Pfender (report, slides)

Advisor: Georg Wittenburg

Application Distribution for Mobile Devices
As mobile wireless devices such as Smart Phones or PDAs get ever more powerful and ubiquitous, the need arises to create new distribution channels for device-specific software. Application repositories such as Apple's App Store, Google's Android Market, or Nokia's Ovi Store are examples for distribution platforms created to provide this kind of service. However, depending on the corresponding business model, the distribution platforms differ both technically and administratively. Your task is to compare a subset of the relevant software distribution platforms for mobile devices; to point out how basic services (secure installation, payment processing, etc.) are handled; and to evaluate in how far the software stack on the mobile devices provides support for this. Which platform do you think will be the most relevant five years from now?
Assigned to: David Goldwich (no report)

USB 3.0
USB 3.0 is an emerging standard targeted at communication between PC-style hardware and peripheral devices. Its main focus is on high-speed, full-duplex communication, host-based addressing, and power management, amongst others. First devices to support USB 3.0 are expected become available during early 2010. Your task is to review the major technical innovations of USB 3.0, to compare them with other approaches that target the same market segment, and to discuss advantages and disadvantages of these design choices. Under which circumstances can USB 3.0 be considered a success five years from now, and how likely is this to occur?
Assigned to: Maximilian Lengsfeld (report, slides)

The Aftermath of UMTS
In August 2000, an average UMTS license in Germany sold for roughly 8.4 billion Euros and now, almost ten years later, we are beginning to see why. The number of bandwidth-hungry services delivered to mobile devices has been steadily increasing, and the deployed UMTS infrastructure is being put to the test. Your task is to explain the inner working of UMTS, to contrast it to previous technologies, and discuss its limitations. In retrospect, was a UMTS license worth its money?
Assigned to: Simon Lang (report, slides)

Advisor: Katinka Wolter

Rare-event simulation
Die Simulation seltener Ereignisse bedarf besonderer Behandlung. Seltene Ereignisse sind beispielsweise Systemausfälle, deren Häufigkeit in einer Bewertung untersucht werden soll. In Simulationen können diese Ereignisse nur beobachtet werden, wenn sehr lange simuliert wird. Es gibt mehrere Methoden trotzdem zu Aussagen über diese seltenen Ereignisse zu kommen. Die Methoden sollen vorgestellt und verglichen werden.
Assigned to: Jan Sydow (report, slides)

Warteschlangen
Zur Analyse von Computersystemen können Warteschlangen und Netze von Warteschlangen verwendet werden. Es sollen die Grundlagen der Analyse mit Warteschlangen und eine Fallstudie vorgestellt werden.
Assigned to: Andreas Weiß (report, slides)

Der Retransmission Timeout von TCP
Die Übertragung jedes Datenpakets von TCP wird von dem Empfänger durch eine Bestätigung quittiert. Bleibt diese Bestätigung aus, so vermutet der Sender, daß sein Paket nicht angekommen ist und sendet es nochmal. Mit diesem Mechanismus stellt das TCP Protokoll die zuverlässige Datenübertragung sicher. Für den Sender ist nun eine wichtige Frage, wie lang er mit der erneuten Übertragung warten soll. Wartet er zu kurz, so kommt die Bestätigung möglicherweise noch und die erneute Übertragung war überflüssig, wartet er zu lang, so muß der Nutzer unnötig lang auf seine Datenübertragung warten. Die Zeit, nach der ein Paket wiederholt gesendet wird berechnet sich üblicherweise nach dem Jacobson-Karn Algorithmus. Der Erfolg dieses Algorithmus kann in der tatsächlichen Übertragungszeit der Daten und in der Fairness gegenüber anderen Teilnehmern im Netz gemessen werden.
Da heutzutage auch an anderen Stellen, z.B. für Web-Services, zuverlässige Nachrichtenübertragung von Bedeutung ist, lohnt es sich, den TCP-Algorithmus zu studieren und auf seine Anwendbarkeit in anderem Kontext hin zu untersuchen.
Assigned to: Philipp Lämmel (report, slides)

Literature

• See AG CST Links on Technical Writing.

© 2009 Freie Universität Berlin, AG CST