[Ns-developers] GSoC 2012 projects discussion

[Dizhi Zhou]

Dear all,

I'm a second year Ph.D student in Canada and plan to apply several NS-3 
projects in GSoC 2012 which are very close to my current research project.

Two questions here:

1, Are all projects in idea page available for student to apply? I know 
that not all projects in idea page were accepted by NS-3 in 2009 and 2010.

2, Can a student apply several projects in NS-3 GSoC 2012? If so, can I 
apply those projects in one proposal? Or I can must submit multiple 
proposals for each project I'm interesting.


In the rest part of this email, I first state the motivation for me to 
apply NS-3 GSoC. Then I list projects I'm interesting and how those 
projects relate to my current research.

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Motivations
     The main motivation for me to apply  GSoC is that my research area 
is very close to several projects in NS-3. Currently, I'm doing the 
multipath video delivery optimization in wireless network. Specifically, 
I focus on the multipath adaptive HTTP streaming and multipath transport 
layer protocol (e.g., multipath TCP, SCTP).   I both develop my solution 
in NS-2 and linux testbed now. Based on above research topic, currently, 
I'm developing the adaptive HTTP streaming traffic model in NS-2.34 and 
use multipath protocol in transport layer. Therefore, several projects 
in NS-3 this year, such as SCTP,  PackMime-HTTP and Tmix, are closely 
related to my research work.

     Another motivation is that I want to move my simulation from NS-2 
to NS-3 and use NS-3 in my future research. I used NS-2 in my research 
for at least 3 years and feel that the maintenance of NS-2 is a big 
issue. Also, two features in NS-3 attracts me a lot:
      a) multiple interface mobile node support
      b) LTE support
     Those two features are very helpful for my research now.

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Interested projects list:
1, SCTP
Although I'm doing the research on concurrent TCP now, I will extend my 
algorithm to SCTP in my future ICC/WCNC 2013 paper. I think implementing 
a standard SCTP based on related RFC drafts is enough now.

2, PackMime-HTTP
Currently, PackMime-HTTP in NS-2 does not consider video traffic. I 
think we can consider this features in NS-3 because web-based video 
increases a lot in recent years.

3, Tmix
In the idea page, it said that the delaybox work is already started. So 
do we need to coordinate the developer of DelayBox in NS-3 in GSoC? Or 
we just develop delaybox independently?

4, NS-3 in cloud
This is a very interesting project. I'm also doing some research on how 
to develop mobile program in cloud environment. Usually, two ways are 
proposed to utilize the cloud resource for mobile program: 1) moving 
part of computing model to cloud side and returning the results to 
client. 2) directly call the API provided by cloud, e.g., HAWAII 
projects in Microsoft.  However, in idea page, it seems that we will run 
all the NS-3 program in cloud. But the computing resource assignment is 
usually done by cloud itself. So what specific missions can NS-3 do in 
the cloud?

4, LTE scheduler
Because I'm doing the research about multipath transmission for video in 
wireless network. Scheduler algorithm is a key part in my work. Although 
this project is in MAC layer, there are still some common parts between 
schedulers  in the upper layer and MAC layer.  However, there are varied 
scheduling algorithms now. Personally, I have a suggestion that we can 
develop a scheduler framework which can be easily further modified to 
the specific new algorithm. This is because NS-3 is a general simulation 
tool and should not focus on a non-standard algorithm in the main source 
tree.

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Looking forward to your suggestions.

Regards
Dizhi

-- 
Dizhi Zhou
PH.D Candidate
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick
540 Windsor Street
Fredericton,New Brunswick,Canada
E3B 5A3

E. q5frc at unb.ca
Homepage: www.cs.unb.ca/~q5frc