Applications are invited for Project type courses (SOP/LOP/Thesis/SAT) to be offered in the First Semester 2023-24 for the research problems described below.

How to Apply? 

Send an e-mail at vsshekhawat@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in with your credentials and interest. One can fill the Online Application Form on ERP portal after receiving a formal approval from me.

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Project Title: Indoor Obstacle finding and avoidance for visually impaired people

Project Description: Indoor spaces are busy with activity and assumption of static environment for navigation of a VI user may not be convenient. Mapping of the environment helps improve navigation. Static objects temporarily placed in the environment can hinder navigation of the user. Similarly, sections of the environment may be blocked for cleaning, maintenance, etc. These cannot be addressed apriori and can only be detected in real-time during navigation. 

Project Title: Performance Evaluation of BBR Protocol

Project Description: Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip Propagation Time (BBR) is a congestion-based congestion control protocol developed by Google as an open-source. Unlike TCP, BBR prevents congestion in the network by estimating BDP using bottleneck bandwidth and Round-trip Propagation time estimation. The first version of the protocol (BBRv1) was released in 2016. Many studies have reported performance issues through empirical and experimental analysis studies. Some of the major issues reported by the researchers are RTT unfairness, coexistence with loss-based algorithms (e.g., CUBIC and Reno), excessive packet loss in shallow buffers, and unfairness between BBR flows, and so on. Google is developing a new version of BBR, BBRv2, to resolve the performance issues of BBRv1, and the alpha version of it was released in 2019. A few studies have also been conducted to evaluate BBRv2 performance and its comparison with BBRv1. These studies indicate that some of the issues listed above still exist. The BBR protocol is in its experimental stage and requires more exhaustive analysis, experimentally and simulated under different use case scenarios before being declared a de facto standard for use.

Project Title: Performance Analysis of QUIC Protocol in Wi-Fi Networks

Project Description: QUIC is relatively new and still under development. Its performance in real-world wireless networks has not been rigorously investigated. In particular, the interplay between transport layer attributes like packet acknowledgments and congestion window growth and MAC layer features such as frame aggregation can significantly affect the overall throughput. Research in this direction is critical to improve the performance of QUIC in Wi-Fi networks.

Project Title: Vulnerability Analysis of QUIC Protocol

Project Description: The QUIC is an encrypted, multiplexed, and low-latency transport protocol designed by Google from the ground up to improve transport performance for HTTP2 traffic. QUIC has been globally deployed at Google on thousands of servers and serves traffic to a range of clients, including a widely-used web browser (Chrome) and a popular mobile video streaming app (YouTube). Like TCP, QUIC is also vulnerable to different types of attack such as Web Fingerprinting and DoS. The objective of this project is to reveal QUIC protocol vulnerabilities

Project Title: Performance Evaluation of HTTP/2 and QUIC

Project Description: The primary goals for HTTP/2 are to reduce latency by enabling full request and response multiplexing, minimize protocol overhead via efficient compression of HTTP header fields, and add support for request prioritization and server push. Unlike TCP, QUIC inherits the stream multiplexing of HTTP/2 at transport layer and enables asynchronous data transfer from server. Therefore, it would be interesting to see the combined effect of HTTP/2 and QUIC on the network traffic load and the server load.

Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks:

Project Description: Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have the potential to interconnect devices in regions that current networking technology cannot reach. The idea is that an end-to-end connection may never be present. To make communication possible, intermediate nodes take custody of the data being transferred and forward it as the opportunity arises. Both links  and nodes may be inherently unreliable and disconnections may be long-lived. The routing solutions in DTNs are based on two aspects, one is replication of messages and another is amount of knowledge (e.g., mobility, contact time, contact duration, etc.) assumed about the nodes in the network. A good routing solution achieves maximum message delivery with minimum replication and least amount of network information desire.  

Traffic Engineering Solutions for Software Defined Networks:

Project Description: The emerging network architecture concept of Software-Defined Networking possesses unique characteristics that make    SDNs well-suited for developing sophisticated Traffic Engineering (TE) systems. A TE framework usually consists of a traffic measurement and a traffic management component. The traffic measurement component collects status information from the network that could include information about the   network structure, its current performance or about the traffic transmitted through it. The traffic management component, which runs at the SDN controller, utilizes this information to equip the network with certain desired functionalities  by implementing them as network services.