This seminar is a block seminar, i.e. at the end of the semester, there will be two days when all talks are given in a block. During the semester, there will be deadlines for status reports, but no meetings of the complete seminar group.

Students participating will give a talk and write a report (7 pages as a general rule but each advisor may specify his own requirements). Besides that, they will review one or two reports written by other students and prepare questions to be asked after the corresponding talk. This is to stimulate discussions after the talks and make the seminar more worthwhile.

Attention: Students have to meet all deadlines listed in the timetable. Otherwise, she/he will lose the right to take part in the final presentation.

Vordiplom or B.Sc., basic knowlegde in telematics

KVV page

Library tour

As announced in the organizational meeting, there will be a library tour with particular focus on searching and finding of literature. The library tour will be on

• 10.11.08, 09:00
• 12.11.08, 09:00

Please register via the Doogle-Page for one of the days.

Please refer to the page of the library for the address.

Schedule

• 15.10.2008:
  • Organizational Meeting - 16:00 Uhr (s.t.), ZIB, Room 2006
• 16.10.2008:
  • Send a list with your five prefered topics in the order of declining preference to seminar-agtech[at]inf.fu-berlin.de.
• 17.10.2008:
  • You will receive your topic via email.
• 20.-24.10.2008:
  • Meet your advisor to discuss content and structure of your report.
  • Optional chance to hand in the first version of your report to get feedback.
• 17.-21.11.2008:
  • Meet your adviser to receive feedback.
• 01.-04.12.2008:
  • Meeting with the advisor to discuss the feedback
• 05.12.2008:
  • Send the draft Report by email
• 08.12.2008:
  • Distribution of the Reports for evaluation among the participants via email
• 19.12.2008:
  • Submission of the Report at CST via email
• 22.12.2008:
  • Advice to the participants for improvement via email
• 15.01.2009:
• • Submission of the final Report
• 22.01.2009:
• • Submission of Presentation slides per email
• End 30/01/09:
  • Presentations

Presentation Schedule (January 30, 2009)

Topics

Advisor: Abd Al Basset Al Mamou
1. Evaluation performance of Ad Hoc routing protocols in WSN
This seminar aims to prepare a literature review about the evaluation performance of Ad Hoc routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks WSNs.
Assigned to: David Reinsch

2. Wireless sensor network – Real world platforms
A wireless sensor network (WSN) becomes an interesting topic in the research and application domains. A lot of real world platforms (sensor nodes) have been produced to be used 
in the WSNs. This topic aims to prepare a survey on the current WSNs platforms used for WSNs.
Assigned to: Abdulqader Omer

3. Network simulators used for Wireless sensor network
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a sort of Ad hoc networks and are simulated using several kind of simulators. The goal of this topic is to prepare a survey on the Network 
simulators used for WSN.

Advisor: Michael Baar
4. Online evaluation of energy consumption in wireless sensor networks
Find and evaluate techniques used for online measurement or estimation of energy consumption in wireless sensor networks. Describe and compare the different approaches. Which 
aspects do they cover (which not)? What is the expected accuracy?
Assigned to: Jonathan Guntermann

Advisor: Bastian Blywis
5. Simulation vs. Testbed
Simulation environments are a powerful tool to do large scale experiments. Implementations can be done focused on a particular topic without regard to an operating system. As simulators use models that abstract from the reality, experiments can result in measured data that have to be interpreted appropriately. Testbeds on the other hand have scaling problems but use real hardware and real media. It is your task to discuss the differences of simulation environments and testbeds. You have to research how the usage of these two tools has changed over time by reviewing conference papers.
Assigned to: Emilian Stoilkov

6. MIMO based wireless mesh networks
The multiple-input multiple-output technology exploits hardware with more than one radio and antenna. The properties of MIMO have to be discussed in the context of wireless mesh networks. Take a look at the draft of the soon to be released IEEE 802.11n standard and the overall standardization process. What advantages and disadvantages do arise with this emerging technology? How can backwards compatibility be achieved? Can MAC and routing protocols take advantage of the features of MIMO devices?
Assigned to: Matthias Philipp

7. VoIP in wireless networks
Since the last decades traditional circuit and packet switched telephony networks are on adecline and getting more and more extinct. Voice over IP providers on the other hand are on the rise by offering an equal service to the end user. This packet switched technology will be present in every household in few years. Using the shared wireless medium as an alternative to cable bound solutions introduces some challenges. It is your task to investigate how the properties of the medium and the used medium access techniques affect the quality of the service. How do the current approaches try to cope with the various problems in contention based and contention free environments? How can guarantees e given and QoS be achieved? Can the user be mobile? You should consider infrastructure based as well as ad-hoc networks. Take a look at the IEEE 802.11e standard.
Assigned to: Onur Kilic

8. TCP in wireless networks
Wireless networks differ from wired ones in many properties. TCP has been developed with particular assumptions that do not hold for radio communication. You have to discuss the overall problems of TCP in wireless networks. What TCP variants do exist that solve these problems? Are such alternatives used in today's networks? Do other transport layer protocols exist that perform better than TCP?
Assigned to: Inas Ali

9. Multicast in wireless mesh networks
Addressing multiple nodes in a network to deliver the same data is called multicasting. There are several approaches to multicast, like IP multicast or by using overlay 
networks. You have to discuss these approaches in the context of wireless mesh networks including their advantages and disadvantages. How can multicast be applied to routing? Name and discuss some of the application scenarios of multicast protocols. Which traditional "technologies" do they replace?
Assigned to: Sebastian Hofmann

Advisor: Norman Dziengel 
10. Judge Positioning Algorithms Concerning their Applicability in WSNs
As resources and energy in WSNs are restricted it is important to use efficient but precise algorithms. In our scenario the unknown position of a node with given algorithms has 
to be determined as precise as possible. Typically range-based lateration algorithms are used to solve this task, for which it is necessary to know distances from known nodes 
to the unknown node. It is assumed that the determination of these distances is not free of error as the position of the node/object changes from time to time. Some algorithms 
like Non-Linear-Regression (NLR) focus on minimum number of distances on the cost of reliability due to a minimum amount of ranges included. The Least Squares (LS) algorithm 
uses an approximation but requires much more expensive matrice-computation than NLR reducing their utility for WSNs. 
Assigned to: Serdar Tosun

11. Indoor Systems that Detect Locomotions of Rescue Forces Connected to a WSN
Locomotion detection is needed for Dead Reckoning. The core problem is to know the current position after a person moves. Movements could be walking, sneaking, running, 
jumping, creeping, crawling and much more different kind of movements. Imagine that a person is not moving as synthetic as a laboratory may assume. In particular firefighters 
have specific movement patterns that differ from a standard walk. Find the leading WSN technologies for indoor movement recognition that use acceleration sensors and/or 
gyroscopes in order to detect how persons like firefighters or other rescue workers move while they are working. Focus on technologies that are able to use just a small amount 
of detection devices, not more than three sensors. The device should be worn all over the body wrapped in sensor nodes. Consider current researches next to industrial products. 
Are those technologies able to detect unknown anomalies during the locomotion?
Assigned to: Frederik Hermans 

Advisor: Thomas Hillebrandt
12. MANET Routing Protocols
In mobile ad-hoc networks standard routing protocols do not work efficiently or not at all. Such networks are envisioned to have dynamic, sometimes rapidly-changing, random, 
multihop topologies which are likely composed of relatively bandwidth-constrained wireless links. Give an introduction to routing in MANETs and present some (at least 3) 
commonly used routing protocols (like AODV, OLSR, DSR, DYMO) discussing their strengths and weaknesses. Base your discussion on describing metrics to judge the suitability and 
performance of routing protocols. Especially pay attention to the overhead produced through the different protocols depending on the grade of node mobility and the network 
size.
Assigned to: Jan Pit Wagner

Advisor: Felix Juraschek
13. Challenges of experimenting in wireless testbeds
Due to the limited accuracy of models used in simulators, wireless testbeds with real hardware gained more attention in the process of performing experiments in an environment 
as close as possible to real world scenarios. With testbeds, new challenges arise, such as the task of network management and experiment execution in regard of node access, 
evaluation, etc. Additionally, the heterogenous character of the various testbeds makes repeatibility of experiments and comparability of obtained results further hard tasks. 
The assignment consists of investigating current testbed setups on how they are solving these challenges and comparing the solutions to the ones achieved in simulation 
environments.

14. DSL approaches for experiment descriptions in wireless testbeds
In order to simplify the description of experiments in network testbed environments, approaches relying on so called domain specific languages (DSL. emerged. Among the 
advantages of these approaches are the support of reproducability of experiments, the possibility to define a clear logical outline, and their comprehensible and easy-to-read 
character since most are based on XML. The goal of this topic is to examine several DSL approaches that have been already made for network experiments and evaluate their 
applicability, advantages and shortcomings.

Advisor: Pardeep Kumar
15. A Real-time MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
In general, the fundamental task of any MAC protocol is to efficiently regulate the access of nodes to a shared medium. However, in the case of resource limited WSN, the MAC 
protocol is open to face some extra concerns. The major concerns are energy efficiency and higher latency. Most of the research related to WSN MAC protocols is targeted for the 
one major objective, the energy efficiency. The timeliness is either dealt as a minor objective or simply ignored. For many applications, such as surveillance, security, 
environment monitoring, health care, home automation, flood, fire, and seismic detection, the provision of timeliness is as important, as the energy efficiency. In this 
research, we are aiming to design a novel WSN MAC protocol, which not only addresses the timeliness challenges efficiently, but provides reasonable trade-offs between 
timeliness and other vital factors, such as energy efficiency.

16. IEEE 802.15.4 for Real-time, Bandwidth, and Energy Efficient Medical Applications
The increase in the world population, diseases, and the natural and non-natural incidents, and the inadequate number of doctors and clinicians available around highlights the 
need of an automatic system. Such system could efficiently but timely alert medical staff for any mishap regardless to the personal's physical location. It can also be used to 
store patient records for the future research and automatic medication purposes. In this topic, we will discuss the suitability of an emerging IEEE 802.15.4 protocol in the 
medical field, especially the timeliness, energy, and bandwidth related features provided by its MAC layer. Research has shown that the protocol carries many limitations, 
especially for time critical scenarios and needs definite enhancements before it could be applied to the medical field. We will explore those limitations and propose an 
efficient solution to overcome those limitations. 
Assigned to: Janine Glahn

Advisor: Freddy Lopez Villafuerte
17. Algorithms to Minimize Error Distances in Localization
Due to the imprecise values on distances obtained from different location-sensing systems through different physical phenomena, it is necessary to process these data points to 
minimize the error of the measurements. The challenge in Wireless Sensor Networks is to develop an algorithm to minimize these errors taking into account the limited resources 
of the sensor nodes in the network.

18. Localization Using Mobile Nodes
The localization problem is an open research problem in Ad hoc Wireless Sensor Nodes. There are different methods to find the node positions into a network. An interesting 
proposal is using mobile node to do localization. With this seminar topic you will show the problems and the advantages to do localization using this kind technique, you will 
look for related work and evaluate the approach for a future expectative with ubiquitous devices.
Assigned to: Yu Weng

19. Density Control for Wireless Sensor Networks
Density control is an important issue to conserve energy while the network provides surveillance over a given place. With this subject, the student has the opportunity to find 
different solution to this problem through an intensive research. The student has to classify the techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks. 

Advisor: Qasim Mushtaq 
20. Comparison of different Link Quality Metrics for IEEE 802.11 Ad hoc Communication
In order to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11 ad hoc communication, different link metrics are used. For example some of the link metrics used are average throughput, 
delay, signal quality etc. Using each of them is useful in different situations depending to the application requirement. However, calculating the link metrics requires system 
and network resources. Therefore, a comparison would be helpful in evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of using each link metric under different situations. 

21. Overview of the IP stack in sensor networks
Due to the scare resources in a sensor node, the IP stack is limited. The overview of this IP stack would be helpful in understanding the communication with a sensor node. 

22. Approaches to on-the-fly programming for Sensor Nodes
The sensors nodes have to be programmed before their use. However, there are some techniques that can help to program the sensor node on-the-fly. This is very convenient and 
helpful, especially when programming a large number of nodes.  

Advisor: Tomasz Naumowicz  
23. Domain Specific Languages in Wireless Sensor Networks
Research in Wireless Sensor Networks has primarily focused on hardware design, self-organization, various routing algorithms, or energy saving patterns. The available tools 
typically target experienced software developers and not researchers from outside of the computer science field. As of today, domain experts such as environmental scientists 
need extensive support from hardware and software engineers during planning, deploying and management of WSNs. This makes a wide adoption of WSNs in real world scenarios 
difficult and, in combination with poor tool support, makes such adoption slow and error prone. In order to make WSNs more attractive, seamless integration of programming and 
deployment tools and a more appropriate level of programming abstraction is needed. Domain Specific Languages have been proposed to address this challenge. Find and compare 
representative approaches in this area. 
Assigned to: Kaspar Schleiser

Advisor: Kirsten Terfloth  
24. Extracting Knowledge from Data Streams in Wireless Sensor Networks
The collection of sensory data physically close to specific phenomena or within areas of interest is nowadays made easy with the advent of wireless sensor networks. However, 
the availability of data is usually just the starting point of the real work - in order to benefit from raw data samples, one has to make sense of what these samples represent.
The task of this work is to become familiar with knowledge extraction from data streams and present and evaluate proposed algorithms for discovering frequent event patterns in 
a distributed network context.
Assigned to: Tobias Fielitz

Advisor: Georg Wittenburg  
25. Current Approaches to Service Placement in Ad hoc Networks
The goal of service placement is to select which node in a network is most suitable for hosting a service that responds to queries from other nodes. Optimally placing services 
reduces network traffic and improves connectivity between clients and servers. Practical approaches to service placement commonly employ heuristics based on information 
gathered from nodes in the neighborhood of the current host. Some heuristics are tailored to the specific application, e.g. coverage, topology or group mobility, and are thus 
not applicable to general-purpose service placement. The goal of this project is to summarize recent approaches to service placement in MANETs, and to evaluate in detail their 
strengths and weaknesses.
Assigned to: Ingo Mohr
 
Advisor: Heiko Will
26. Energiesparen in Sensornetzen. Vergleich und Analyse verschiedener Vefahren.
Die Minimierung des Energieverbrauchs ist eines der zentralen Forschungsgebiete im Themenkomplex Drahtlose Sensornetzwerke. Energie lässt sich auf allen Ebenen der Entwicklung einsparen - sowohl beim Hardware- als auch beim Softwaredesign. Ziel dieses Seminarthemas soll es sein sich einen Überblick über die Einsparmöglichkeiten auf der Ebene des Funks zu geben. Es sollen sowohl die wesentlichen Taktiken zur Energieeinsparung aktueller Routing- als auch Mac-Strategien untersucht und dargestellt werden. Die 
herausgearbeiteten Punkte sind ausführlich zu diskutieren und hinsichtlich ihrer Konsequenzen zu anderen Kriterien wie Latenz und Durchsatz zu betrachten. Hierzu ist die 
Entwicklung einheitlicher und sinnvoller Vergleichskriterien notwendig.
Assigned to: Lutz Vöhringer

Links and Hints

• Link collection of CST
• Technical Writing and Presentation

Templates

• IEEE Latex Template for Reports.
• IEEE Word Template for Reports.
• Review Template.
• Freie Universität Berlin Corporate Design - Presentation Template.