Seminar on Internet Technology

Block seminar on recent advances in Internet technology. The seminar will cover a large variety of topics, including cyber-physical/industrial communication systems, large-scale/data center networks, security and privacy, and system/protocol modeling and testing.

Organizational Information

Lecturer: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Wehrle
Coordinating teaching assistant: Jan Pennekamp
Contact: seminar (at) comsys.rwth-aachen.de
2 SWS (several deadlines spread throughout the lecture period; block presentations at the end of the lecture period or beginning of the lecture-free time)
ECTS Credits: 4/5 (depending on examination regulations)
Study programs: Bachelor Computer Science, Bachelor Education Computer Science, Bachelor Technical Communication, Bachelor Mathematics, Erasmus Bachelor
Registration: During central registration process in January 2025. See our notes below on the selection process!
Language: English

Important Dates

Kick-off Meeting: TBA at COMSYS chair; participation is mandatory; details will be announced to the selected participants via email.
Deadlines for submission of papers, reviews and presentations (including hard deadlines) are spread over the lecture period and announced during the kick-off meeting.
Your presentations take place in a block seminar in person, most likely on two days at the end of the lecture-period or beginning of the lecture-free time (no fixed date(s) yet). Please take this into account when planning your semester and/or holidays.

Topics

Several members of the COMSYS team will propose topics from their respective current research areas, such as:

Cyber-Physical Systems: Industrial communication systems, Internet of Things, wireless networks, low-latency systems, systems engineering and tool development (simulation, ...), localization, ...
Network Architectures: Internet measurements, light-weight security, low-latency stacks, peer-to-peer systems, programmable networks (Cloud, NFV, SDN, ...), protocol offloading, quality of experience, ...
Security and Privacy: Network security and privacy in the Internet of Things and Cyber-physical Systems, security and privacy in Cloud-based systems, secure communication protocols (TLS, ...), anonymous communication, privacy enhancing technologies, privacy-preserving protocols, ...
Systems Analysis: Dynamic symbolic and concolic execution of programs, hunting bugs in programs and protocols, testability and verification of (software and) distributed systems, ...

We also maintain an overview of seminar topics we offered in the past. The topics will be distributed during the kick-off meeting based on submitted priorities by the students.

Seminar Details

The seminar provides a broad overview on existing distributed systems and current research topics in advanced areas of Internet technology. It is our paramount interest to see that you gain a thorough understanding of your seminar topic and that you are able to convey this understanding to the other participants. For you to benefit from the presented knowledge, we encourage active participation and interaction between students. You will both synchronize with each other while preparing your talk as some topics overlap and discuss the contents after the talks themselves.

Your contribution to the seminar is twofold: you present your topic concisely in a 20-minute talk to the other seminar students and you supply a paper providing more detail than the talk on the topic. Furthermore, you are expected to engage in discussions about each talk. Plagiarism of any form is unacceptable and will lead to your immediate suspension from the seminar.

In production of the seminar paper, we follow a "conference organization style". That means: After the assignment of topics during the kick-off meeting, you first do a literature survey and then you prepare a paper about the topic. You are submitting your paper in the same way as you would submit it for a conference: It will be reviewed and you will get back comments for improvement of your paper. The reviewing process will also be done by the seminar participants, i.e., you have to write a review about two or three other seminar papers (and you also get feedback from two or three other students). Basing on the comments, you have to prepare the final version of your seminar paper and finally the presentation of your topic.

Papers

While the talk focuses on the overview and details of interest, the paper allows you to discuss your topic in its full breadth and depth. It covers all aspects of the talk and provides additional insights to related work and specifics. For example, source code snippets or interface descriptions would not go into your talk but may well show up in your paper where applicable.

The papers are based on the official IEEE conference style and are expected to be between six and eight pages in length (hard limits). You will be provided with the required LaTeX template (non-TeXed papers (e.g., Word, ...) will not be accepted).

Talks

The goal of the talk is to give the audience a good understanding of the whole topic and to dive into a few interesting details of the subject matter. The ratio of one to the other depends on the topic and needs to be determined with your supervisor. Each talk is scheduled to be 20 minutes, followed by 5 to 10 minutes of discussion.

Prerequisites

Note that despite the name, topics are not necessarily aligned with the contents of the Advanced Internet Technology lecture. Still, to participate in the seminar, you should have some previous knowledge on Internet technology. That is, you should have attended a lecture on data communications and/or one of the lectures "Advanced Internet Technology" / "Mobile Internet Technology" / "Communication Systems Engineering". In case you have not attended one of these lectures but nevertheless some knowledge about Internet technology from other sources, participation is also possible.

Please note that this is not the Bachelor Proseminar and that prior successful participation in a Proseminar may be mandatory depending on your "Prüfungsordnung" (ask your study advisor or the examination board if in doubt).

Selection Process

Each semester there is a huge demand for places in our seminars. To increase your chances of being selected for our seminars, you should clearly state in your application how you would benefit from participating in the seminar and how the seminar (i.e., the other students) would benefit from your participation. Please also indicate any courses that you may have taken with us. Also note that students who previously dropped out of our seminars after the de-registration deadline (and thus prevented another student from participating) will be treated with lowest priority during the selection process.
The application process is centrally managed through a registration platform.