The Proseminar Technische Informatik expands on other Bachelor-level lectures with focus on technical computer science. Students pick a topic related to current technology and/or partially covered in the previous lectures and write a report (12 A4 pages including figures and references, single column, 1.5 spacing, 11-point font) discussing corresponding questions. At the end of the term, the participants present their results in the form a short talk (20 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A) in a meeting. This course places special emphasis on dealing competently with academic and primary literature, structure and legibility of the report, and the style of the presentation (50% of final grade). During the term, there will be deadlines for status reports, but no weekly meetings of the complete seminar group.

Schedule

• 11.07.2011:
  • Organizational Meeting - 12:00 Uhr (c.t.), room K40, Takustr. 9
  • Read the literature linked below.
• 21.10.2011:
  • Very last day to choose a topic via e-mail to Katinka Wolter.
• 21.10.2011:
  • Organizational Meeting - 10:00 Uhr (c.t.), K40, Takustr. 9
  • Prepare a list of journals, conferences, workshops, as well as online databases you would use for literature research w.r.t. your assigned topic (motivate your selection)
  • Slides
• 02.12.2011:
  • Hand in a preliminary outline and reference list to your advisor via e-mail.
• 27.01.2012:
  • Final version of your report must be handed in to your advisor and Katinka Wolter via e-mail.
• 03.02.2012:
  • Final version of your slides must be handed in to your advisor and Katinka Wolter via e-mail.
• 09.02.2012:
  • 1st Part. The seminar will take place. Attendance is mandatory.
  • 10:00 Uhr (s.t.), room TBA, Takustr. 9
• 10.02.2012:
  • 2nd Part. The seminar will take place. Attendance is mandatory.
  • 10:00 Uhr (s.t.), room TBA, Takustr. 9

Attention: Students that do not meet all deadlines listed in the timetable, will lose the right to take part in the final presentation.

The talks will be given according to this schedule:

Thursday, 09.2.2012, Room SR 053:
Session 1:
10:00 - 10:30
10:30 - 11:00
11:00 - 11:30
11:30 - 12:00
Session 2:
13:00 - 13:30
13:30 - 14:00
14:00 - 14:30

Topics

Advisor: Norman Dziengel

Wireless Sensor Networks for Human Rehabilitation
We often read that the technology of sensors, computers and software will aid the humanity to grow older than expected in the future. Rehabilitation systems, sport systems and supporting aid systems may be the first steps in the direction of an ubiquitous human system that supports our life actively. Actually, only some rare systems do exist for that kind of technical support. Find radio communication based systems that ideally are applied in the area of rehabilitation and compare them in a rough way. The focus of this work is to present a wide overview of such man-machine systems and to give a rough technical overview to each system.
Assigned to: Jan Hase

Wireless Martial Art Training Devices
In Martial Arts we often see complex movements and impressive skills of the martial art students and teachers. Some technical approaches try to record, analyze and evaluate these movements with multiple sensors, cameras and embedded devices. Try to find some (more than three) approaches that deal with martial arts and assess their applicability in the context of a real martial art student. Further, try to compare the approaches and give a rough technical overview to each system.
Assigned to: Samir Al-Sheikh

How to evaluate anti-virus products?
Several companies compare and test well known anti-virus products. Find those companies. How do these companies protect themselves against manipulation and intrusions? How do these companies protect the test-workstation, the test room, the building and any kind of access? Which typical methods are used to evaluate and assess common anti-virus products? How and are these companies performing so called "Retrospective tests"? How important is a false positive/alarm test? How do they get paid for their work? Maybe you find some Non-Profit-Organizations? How often do they update the results? How do we (the typical consumer) get the results? Give suggestion how to handle the given results.

Use the following websites to start your work: Virus Bulletin (www.virusbtn.com), NSS Labs (www.nsslabs.com), ICSA Labs (www.icsalabs.com), West Coast Labs (www.check-mark.com), AV-Test (www.av-test.de), CheckVir (www.checkvir.com), AV-Comparatives e.V. (www.av-comparatives.org)
Assigned to: Thomas Tegethoff

Advisor: Zakaria Kasmi

Routingverfahren in Fahrer-Assistenz-Systemen
Fahrer-Assistenz-Systeme werden eigesetzt, um ein Fahrzeugfahrer während des
Fahrprozesses zu unterstützen. Damit können Verkehrsunfälle und Staus vermieden werden.
Mit Hilfe der Sensorknotenintegration und der Fahrzeugsensorik ergeben sich aus der
spontanen Vernetzung der Fahrzeuge untereinander dynamische Ad-hoc-Netze.
Der Fokus in dieser Arbeit soll auf die Zwischen-Fahrzeugen-Kommunikationssysteme gelegt
werden. Es müssen die Routingsverfahren bei solchen Systemen untersucht werden. Als
Routing wird die Wegeberechnung für einen Datenpaket von einem Quellknoten zu einem
Zielknoten bezeichnet.
Assigned to: Lotte Steenbrink

Advisor: Philipp Reinecke

Introduction to Discrete-Event Simulation
Discrete-event simulation is used in many incarnations throughout various research disciplines. Describe the fundamental assumptions and basic technology of a discrete-event simulator.
Assigned to: Lars Baumelt

OMNeT++ vs. TimeNET
OMNeT++ is a discrete-event simulator, while TimeNET is a Petri net tool. Both are used in the evaluation of systems. Describe the tools, their respective application areas, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages for answering specific questions.
Assigned to: TBA

Introduction to Measurement Tools
Various tools exist to perform measurements in real systems and testbeds. Provide an overview of these, paying particular attention to the specific metrics that can be obtained and the application areas the tools are most suited to.
Assigned to: Maximilian Alber

Introduction to Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs)
Stochastic Petri nets are a common tool in performance, dependability, and performability modelling and evaluation. Introduce the basic concepts of the formalism, the underlying math, and suitable application areas.
Assigned to: Lukas Kairies

Basics of Performability Analysis
Meyer et al. have developed performability analysis as a framework for analysing the performance of degradable systems. Present an introduction to the basic framework and illustrate its application.
Assigned to: TBA

Advisor: Sebastian Trapp

Tie Strength - Background
Assigned to: TBA

Autonomous Trust-Establishment
Assigned to: TBA

Advisor: Matthias Wählisch

Visualizing the Internet Intuitively: Maps?!
The Internet can be modelled as a graph. Nodes may be represented by IP prefixes, Autonomous System numbers, or routers. An intuitive visualization may help to understand the Internet structure better (e.g., to identify weak transits). However, the very high number of nodes and even more edges make it a big challenge to bring some light into the 'ravel'. There are common layout algorithms from graph theory that focus on the optimization of the general layout (e.g., minimize crossing edges). On the other hand, specific visualization techniques have been developed for the Internet topology. This work should analyze the recently introduced work by Gansner et al. about GMap, which visualize graphs and clusters as maps. How does the algorithm work? How can it be applied to visualize the Internet? Which Internet-specific metrics are required to draw the map?
Assigned to: Sebastian Thobe

Towards a better understanding of BGP with C-BGP
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard for dynamic Internet backbone routing. BGP routes used for data forwarding are selected based on a complex decision process that is defined by the protocol. Analysing, understanding, and enhancing the routing between Internet domains (e.g., different ISPs), thus, require not only a substantiated knowledge about BGP, but also tools to emulate BGP internals. C-BGP is aimed at computing the outcome of the BGP decision process in networks composed of several routers. It can be used as a research tool to experiment with modified decision processes and additional BGP route attributes. The goal of this work is to get familiar with BGP and to give an introduction about C-BGP. What are the great ideas and the limits of this software. You are highly encouraged to conduct practical tests.
Assigned to: Jacob Schramm

How does the infrastructure look behind your Mobile?
Mobiles are omnipresent and evolved from telephones to full-fledged Internet devices. Cellular devices, however, are probably differently connected to the Internet in contrast to your PC at home. In fact, up until now there is very little understanding of the infrastructure characteristics (e.g., routing design, address allocation, DNS) that serve your mobile phone. The aim of this work is to analyze related work that studies the cellular network infrastructure with respect to the Internet data transmission. A good starting point is the paper by Xu et al. which was recently presented at SIGMETRICS 2011.
Assigned to: Tarik Hidiroglu

Deploying new protocols in the Internet backbone - Does the market help?
Changing protocols in the Internet backbone is a quite challenging task even though they are more efficient and more secure as the currently deployed versions. IPv6 is one prominent example. Another and at the moment very hot topic is Secure BGP, which allows for robust Internet backbone routing. Currently, the Internet backbone is very vulnerable. BGP routers may announce invalid paths and thus redirect traffic (e.g., as YouTube example 2008 has shown). However, the Internet Engineering Task Force is working on an update of BGP. Independent of technical issues there are reasonable doubts with respect to a fast transition. This work should discuss the upcoming paper by Gill et al., which will be presented at SIGCOMM 2011. In addition, you should answer at least the following questions: Are there other work that analyzed different protocols? Are there any other methodologies to quantify the upcoming success of a deployment?
Assigned to: TBA

Advisor: Katinka Wolter

Whats next after UMTS?
Evaluate and compare the new upcoming mobile phone standards LTE and LTE advanced with respect to their coverage, basic technologies, data rates, infrastructure etc.
Assigned to: Dennis Lampert

What drives mobile devices?
Evaluate and compare operating systems for mobile devices, e.g. iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and their respective market place for applications.
Assigned to: Maximilian Schmidt

How vulnerable is my mobile phone?
Today’s mobile phones are low-power PCs with operating system, lots of applications etc. This also brings up the dangers of viruses, Trojan horses, malware, exploits, etc. How big is the danger? How does this affect privacy?
Assigned to: Hinnerk van Bruinehsen

Processors for mobile devices
Evaluate and compare typical processors for mobile devices, such as tablets, mobile phones. What are the differences to PC CPUs, what are the trends?
Assigned to: Lukas Ribisch

Real deployments of wireless sensor networks
Researchers discuss WSNs since more than 10 years. However, only very few real installations run longer than needed for simple experiments. Which big WSNs do really exist in the wild? What are the main challenges?
Assigned to: TBA

Spectrum reuse
Spectrum for wireless communication is rare – is it really or just artificially limited by legacy systems and politics? Discuss spectrum use today and tomorrow with respect to cognitive radios, software defined radios etc.
Assigned to: TBA

Smart Grid
The Smart Grid is an initiative that has the goal of achieving the modernization and optimization of the power grid so that it is more reliable, efficient, secure, and environmentally neutral. Discuss the Smart Grid and show communications aspects related to the Smart Grid initiative.
Assigned to: Robert Schlenz

Green IT
Yet another buzzword or really an initiative to make IT more resource friendly? Today, IT makes a major contribution to the power consumption of industries but also private homes. How does Green IT attack this issue?
Assigned to: Robert Schmidt

Internet of Things revisited
Announced many years ago the IoT should change our everyday’s live. Today, we see some aspects of it while most of the promises and ideas never really took of. However, IoT is currently being discussed up to IoNanoThings… Evaluate and give a realistic picture of these ideas.
Assigned to: Nicolas Lehmann

Stuxnet - the first cyberweapon?
In September 2010 the Trojan Stuxnet caused a lot of trouble and gained much attention. This talk should explain what Stuxnet was, how it worked, how it was detected and how it should be classified in the set of known security threats.
Assigned to: Ricky Pogalz

What is a watchdog and how can it be used for failure detection?
A watchdog can be a software or hardware component in a computing system. The talk should explain how a watchdog works and what it can be used for. Special attention should be given to failure detection using watchdogs as published by Christoph Fetzer in IEEE Transactions on Computers in 2003. For literature on failure detectors "Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems", by Tushar Deepak Chandra and Sam Toueg, Journal of the ACM (1996) should be considered.
Assigned to: Tom Bullmann

What is clocksynchronisation, why do we need it and how does it work?
Clocks of computing systems are rarely very accurate. For most desktop applications synchronisation in regular intervals is sufficient. Mostly in distributed, real-time, or distributed high-availability systems exact clock synchronisation is essential. The work of Hermann Kopetz should be considered. The talk should present today's standard methods for time and frequency synchronisation and discuss their cost.
Assigned to: Marcus Höhne

Advisor: Marco Ziegert

Use Case Low-Power Application: MCU, FPGA, DSP, or mixed The Platform
Choice
Event Detection, Embedded Image and Sound Processing are current use cases
of in-field computation in Wireless Sensor Networks. The aim is to
preprocess data directly to avoid transferring all information to a sink
just for the need of computation. Depending on the application we need the
possibility to preprocess a huge amount of collected raw data directly at
the source. A specialized processor with low power consumption but high
computational performance will assist during the preprocessing task. Present
at least three different applications and their ideal choice of varying
hardware in the embedded context.

Assigned to: Enrico Schröder

Literature

• Writing a good introduction by Jim Kurose (it may help as guideline)
• See AG CST Links on Technical Writing.