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

  1. Presentation: A short talk summarizing the paper and what you reproduced.
  2. 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: