The "SmartNets Lab" ("Praktikum Intelligente Netzwerke"; TUCaN-no. 18-sm-2150-pr) is a new lab for M.Sc. and diploma students of Electrical Engineering and B.Sc. and M.Sc. students of Computer Science (and related study programs) which is offered for the first time in the winter term 2011/2012.

Course Description

The proliferation of wireless broadband technologies and mobile devices such as smartphones has led to many new applications in the area of, e.g., communication or entertainment. The access to distributed mobile applications from anywhere and anytime imposes high requirements in terms of scalability, efficiency, and reliability on the underlying communication infrastructure. Additional challenges arise from the fact that smartphones, on a growing scale including sensing capabilities like accelerometer, camera, and location, can become service providers themselves. Smart Networks address these challenges with the help of novel networking concepts like peer-to-peer (P2P) and other service overlay networks (SON), e.g. Pastry and Chord, as well as virtual and programmable networks (e.g., OpenFlow). In this lab, a distributed mobile application will be designed, implemented, and evaluated on a smart network testbed including Android and Apple iOS devices, wireless access points, and PlanetLab nodes. At the beginning of the semester groups of 3 to 4 students, and one advisor will be formed. All teams will work on the same, novel, challenging, but feasible task, which definition and evaluation criteria will be specified by the lab advisors. At the end of the semester, the teams will present and demonstrate their result as a software prototype and a technical report. The best team will receive the Smart Networking Award.

The ability to solve and evaluate problems in the area of design and development of smart networks and applications shall be acquired. Acquired competences are:

• Requirements engineering, design, implementation, and testing of scalable, efficient, and reliable software components and communication protocols for distributed mobile applications in smart networks
• Application of object-oriented programming techniques
• Acquisition of project management skills for small development teams
• Writing of software documentation and project reports
• Presentation and demonstration of project results

Requirements

Interest to develop challenging solutions for smart networks and applications. Further we expect:

• Solid experience in programming Java and/or Objective-C (C/C++).
• Solid knowledge of communication protocols.
• Basic knowledge in project management.
• Lectures in Communication Networks I and II are an additional plus.

Resources

The lab material will be made available using the Moodle platform:

FB18 - PS - Praktikum Intelligente Netzwerke

The Moodle course requires a password that will be announced during the first lab.