EEL 6788: Advanced Topics in Computer Networks (Fall 2005)

Faculty:           Dr. Damla Turgut
Office:             ENGR 450
Phone:             (407) 823-6171
Email:             turgut@cs.ucf.edu

Class Time:    Wednesday 1:30 PM - 4:20 PM
Classroom:     BA 218
Office Hours: Tuesday 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM and Wednesday 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Web site:        http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~turgut/COURSES/EEL6788_ACN_Fall05/
Class Mailing List:   eel6788_AdvCompNets@ece.ucf.edu

TA:                  Mr. Majid A. Khan
Office:             ENGR 265
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Email:             khan@hector.cs.ucf.edu

Pre-requisite: EEL 4781 (Computer Networks) and/or consent of instructor

Textbook(s):
There is no required textbook for this course. However, several reference book(s) are given below.

Reference Books:
1. C. S. Raghavendra, Krishna M. Sivalingam and Taieb Znati, Eds., "Wireless Sensor Networks, An Edited Book", Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004.
2. Feng Zhao, Leonidas Guibas, "Wireless Sensor Networks : An Information Processing Approach", The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking, 2004.
3. Agrawal and Zang, "Introduction to Wireless and Mobile Systems", Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2003.
4. Nicopolitidis, Obaidat, Papadimitriou, and Pomportsis, "Wireless Networks", Wiley, 2003.
5. Thurwachter, "Wireless Networking", Prentice Hall, 2002.
6. Stojmenovic, "Handbook of Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing", Wiley, 2002.
7. C.E. Perkins, Ed., "Ad Hoc Networking", Addison-Wesley, 2001.
8. C.-K. Toh, "Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks: Protocols and Systems", Prentice Hall PTR, 2002.
9. Selected research papers from journals, conferences and technical reports.

Course Motivation:
Mobile multi-hop radio networks, also called ad hoc or peer-to-peer networks, play a critical role in places where a wired (central) backbone is neither available nor economical to build, such as law enforcement operations, battle field communications, or disaster recovery situations. The civillian applications of these networks have also gained tremendous support from both researchers and industrial partners within the last few years. The challenge of this multi-cluster, multi-hop packet radio network architecture for wireless systems is that they should be able to dynamically adapt itself with the ever changing network configurations.

Wireless sensor networks on the other hand are the new class of networks that are consisting of a collection of small in size, lightweight, low-power devices. These self-configurable wireless networks are capable of monitoring their external environments and converting the sensed data into a form understandable by a user. The applications of these networks are tremendous such as home, office, hospital, and military. The sensor networks need various protocols that are application specific, data centric, energy efficient, and capable of aggregating and disseminating data. This course will look into the challenges of ad hoc and sensor networks and try to design and build innovative solutions to these problems.

Course Objectives:
The course is designed mainly for graduate students; however, interested and qualified undergraduate
students are also encouraged. The course objectives are to provide the students with an:

understanding of current ad hoc and sensor networks theory and practice
opportunity to work on projects related to applications of wireless networks
experience on reading and writing research papers

Course Description:
This course will be a survey of the state of the art in ad hoc and sensor networks, and will cover various topics including protocols for clustering, service discovery and self organizing routing, energy/power conservation, data management, data dissemination and aggregation, adaptive topology management, MAC, security, new sensor network applications and so on

Grading Scheme:
The semester grade will be based on the following:
individual or group project (70%), assignments (25%), and attendance (5%)

Class Project:
The class projects require

design and simulation of a chosen research topic
usage of one of the recommended network simulator packages for the simulation of the proposed algorithm and/or protocol
verification of the simulation results with analytical analysis
written report including the research project findings and
initial and final presentations

The class project can be individual or may include maximum of 2 students per group.

Paper Reviews:
Written reviews (hard copies) for each paper to be discussed in class for the coming week are
due on the previous Friday. The soft copies of the reviews should be sent to the instructor's email account at the same time

For each paper, students should write a review answering each of the following questions:
   1.What problems (with prior work or the lack thereof) were addressed or surveyed by the authors?
   2.What solutions were proposed or surveyed by the authors?
   3.What are the technical strengths and main contributions of the paper's proposed solutions?
   4.What are the technical weaknesses of the paper's proposed solutions?
   5.What suggestions do you have to improve upon the paper's ideas?