The University of Sydney
                                                          AUSTRALIA

School of Electrical and Information Engineering
 
 

Research Summaries
Undergraduate Final Year Projects

Supervised by
Dr. Abbas Jamalipour
2000

If you need more information on any of these projects please contact me at (abbas@ee.usyd.edu.au).
Alternatively, you can come to my office: Room 751, Level 7,  Bldg J03.

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1. Quality of Service Considerations in GSM and GPRS Cellular Networks (Special Topic-AJ01S)
student: Minh Vy Nguyen

Summary: This thesis topic is designed to provide an opportunity for the student to develop a detailed understanding of the issues involved in quantifying customer perceived quality of service (QoS) in cellular networks and radio based packet data networks. Specifically, the student will work with the GSM cellular network and its new phase; i.e. the GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) network, currently being developed by telecommunications carriers to provide specific quality of service metrics. The project involves in a literature survey on the issue of QoS in cellular networks and especially GSM and GPRS networks. In addition, simulation programs to show the performance of those networks will be developed in this project. More attention will be devoted to the emerging IP applications over cellular networks and the QoS requirements of such applications. The project requires good background in telecommunications and data communication networks and skill in computer programming using C++ or MATLAB.

2. Internet Telephony: Voice Over IP and Voice over DSL  (Special Topic-AJ02S)
student: Fred Mitry

Summary: The usage of the global Internet for telephone services has been recently become a very important topic for the telecommunication researchers. In this project, the state-of-the art for voice over IP and voice over DSL will be investigated. In particular, the quality and reliability over PSTN service, the emerging opportunity for service providers, the PSTN interoperability & integration, and the high speed data plus multiple voice lines (VODSL) will be considered. A particular vendor solution, such as the Alcatel Solution, will be considered in this project.

3. Network Alarm Reporting System (Special Topic-AJ03S)
student: Susanna Christine Huntington

Summary: Thesis Topic: To build a Network Alarm Reporting System, NARS, that takes as its input the error messages from a network and sends to a selected mobile phone the error message.  This system is to be designed to be portable.  This system will have the ability to work on different types of digital voice and data networks, air conditioners and on power supplies.  The intent of this system is that a communications network after hour's staff will be able to receive any faults without being required on site.  This project will have a hardware component and a software component.  The software is to be designed in PERL.  The software portion will lift the alarms from the SNMP layer, choose only the alarms selected by the user to be reported and send the message to the mobile phone (via email).  The User Interface will also be designed in PERL.

4. Design and Implementation of a Push Initiating Service Using the WAP and the PAP (Special Topic-AJ04S)
student: Ching Fen Cherry Wu

Summary: The aim of this project is to design and implement a system that has the capability of initiating push of Internet data to wireless devices such as Mobile phones. The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an emerging protocol that provides bridging from mobile networks to the Internet (WWW). By conforming to this protocol, wireless devices have the ability to access data on the Internet. The data on the Internet (HTML, XML, GIF, JPG, etc.) has to be translated to WML (Wireless Markup Language); a simple mobile browser based Markup Language. Through WAP and WML, mobile users have the ability to link directly to a WAP Web site via a URL or IP Address. However, the technology of pushing Internet information to specific mobile users are still early in its development. The Push Access Protocol (PAP) is an extension to WAP, specially designed for Push Initiating Services. The design and implementation of this project will incorporate the standards defined in WAP/PAP and WML. Thereby creating a service that is able to push Internet data intelligently to mobile users.

5. Experimental Flow Control Protocols Simulator (Pooled Topic-AJ05P)
student: Alan McIntyre

Summary: One important issue in a network is the flow control which for example performed in the data link layer of the OSI reference model. The purpose of the flow control mechanism is to solve the incompatibility of the speed of transmission from a fast sender to a slow receiver. This situation can easily be occurred when the sender is running on a fast or lightly loaded computer and the receiver is running on a slow or heavily loaded machine. The sender keeps pumping the frames out at a high rate until the receiver is completely swamped. Even if the transmission is error free, at a certain point the receiver will simply not be able to handle the frames as they arrive and will start to lose some. In this project, the student will develop an experimental simulation package that can show (very simply) to the students of Data Communication Network course what will happen in a real network if the flow control mechanism is not applied or applied but does not work properly. The project requires good background in data communication network and Visual C++ programming skill. The simulator will be user-interfaced on Windows OS and will provide different options to the user such as selection of any of the available flow control mechanisms, and will provided statistics on data communications saved on a database file.

6. TCP/IP Traffic Follower (Pooled Topic-AJ06P and AJ07P)
students: Anirudh Manohar Banger and Dariush Khalilifar

Summary: In this project two students with strong background in programming with Visual C++ language will develop a program and its user interface (on Windows OS) which monitors the flow of the TCP/IP traffic over the network. The program will be automatically launched whenever a program that uses a TCP/IP connection starts or can be launched at any other time manually. The purpose of the program is to track the record of TCP/IP connection traffic, such as the amount of traffic being transmitted from or received by the host machine, based on different applications. For example, in the case of usage of an email program, the TCP/IP Traffic Follower checks the details of the data transmission including the number of messages transmitted or received during a given period of time, the size of each message, whether it has an attachment or not, etc. Major Internet applications including email, web browsing, telnet, and ftp will be included in the program. The program also will have the ability to keep the tracked data in a database file and can provide some statistical graphs to the user as its optional functions.

7. Ethernet versus ATM in Long-Delay Communications Channels (Pooled Topic-AJ08P)
student: Simone Elizabeth Pearson

Summary: Ethernet and ATM provide different characteristics in wired networks and both are widely used. In this project, we will consider the performance of these two leading technologies when they are used in a networks which suffers from high propagation delays, such in long-distance communications or in a satellite wireless network. The project requires good programming skills in C++ or MATLAB and requires some initial mathematical analysis and readings in the beginning of the project. The student working on this project will need some initial literature survey and reading on Ethernet and ATM networks and then find performance measures that are necessary to be considered in this performance comparison. Knowledge on digital communications is not necessary for performing the project but would be helpful.

8. Performance Study of TCP over the Wireless Channel (Pooled Topic-AJ09P)
student:

Summary: TCP is the most widely used protocol at transport layer of the network stack. Its flow control mechanism is based on time out and window-size adjustment which can work with high utilization in wired network with low bit error rates (BER) in the order of 10-8. However, in the case of wireless channel in which the BER is in the order of 10-3 or more, it cannot work efficiently. The reason is that in those wireless channels the main cause for the packet loss is the high BER and not the congestion as we have in wired network. The low efficiency of the TCP on wireless channel comes as a result of this fact that the TCP cannot distinguish between the packet loss because of high error rate and that of congestion. In both cases, after time out the TCP decrease its window size which results in low throughput in the network. In this project, the student will compare the performance of TCP over channels with high BER and tries to develop a method to improve the performance of TCP. The project requires sufficient background in data networking and the skill in writing computer programs on C++ or MATLAB.