Course Project
The project component includes two hands-on assignments:
a warm-up project to develop essential skills, and a reproducibility project to deepen your understanding through practice.
Below is a concise overview. Full details live on Canvas.
Warm-Up Project
The warm-up project gives you practical experience with Internet-scale measurement techniques, focusing on analyzing cross-border dependencies in government hosting.
Deliverables
- Report: 3–5 pages describing your methodology, findings, and analysis.
- Presentation: A concise 5-minute presentation summarizing your work.
Reproducibility Project
For the second assignment, you will work in small teams to reproduce results from a published research paper.
This is designed to help you deeply understand a significant networking paper and its methodology.
You will:
- Choose a paper (from the course list or propose your own).
- Identify the specific component you intend to reproduce.
- Outline your approach and scope.
- Contact the original authors (strongly encouraged!).
- Meet at least once with course staff for a mid-quarter check-in.
Final Deliverables
- Presentation: A short talk summarizing the paper and what you reproduced.
- Report:
- 6 pages max, using the HotNets format.
- Appendices/webpage allowed for additional details.
Suggested Report Structure
- Abstract – What you did, why it matters, and your top-line results.
- Problem Statement – What problem were you addressing?
- Prior Work – What has been done, and why wasn’t it enough?
- Research Approach – What you built or analyzed; how you approached replication.
- Results – Evaluation, insights, unexpected findings.
- Lessons Learned + Future Work – What you’d change or extend.
- Summary + Conclusion – Wrap-up and implications.
Resources
This project’s structure is inspired by an excellent course originally developed by Nick McKeown at Stanford:
https://reproducingnetworkresearch.wordpress.com/about/
For your paper:
- Use the HotNets LaTeX template from the CFP archive
https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2024/docs/hotnets24-template.zip - Additional examples and guidance are available on Canvas.