Distributed Computing
ETH Zurich

Seminar in Distributed Computing (WS 2005/06)

When & Where: Wednesdays, 15:15-17:00 @ ETZ G 91

Professor: Roger Wattenhofer

Coordinator: Regina O'Dell

The Seminar is now over. We thank everybody for participating. Students wishing to discuss their presentation can contact their mentors.

Organization

As a seminar participant, you are invited to

Presentation

Below we have a series of suggested papers which have been assigned on a first-come-first-serve basis. There are no more time slots available for a presentation in this semester.

Some papers are harder to understand than others. Some papers come in groups, where you need to read and compare all the papers in the group. Tough papers are marked with a star, or even two stars. (Hard papers are sometimes easier to present because not as much detail will be expected in the presentation.)

Your presentation should cover the motivation for the problem as well as some technical parts of the paper in detail. Assume that the other participants know nothing about the subject. You are not supposed to present the whole paper, but just the aspects of the paper that were most intriguing to you. We encourage you to deviate from the logical structure of the paper and strive for the most lucid presentation of the topic. It can also be helpful to go beyond the list of your papers and look at related work.

We further expect the presentation to motivate a lively discussion. Your presentation should not be a mere transfer of knowledge, but inspire an animated debate amongst the seminar participants.

Your slides and talk should be in English. The presentation should last 45 minutes plus about 15 minutes of discussion.

Discussion

We encourage discussion during and after a presentation as a main objective of this seminar. The extent to which your own presentation instigates discussion as well as your own participation in the other presentations will influence your grade in this course.

Evaluation

Following the technical part of the presentation and discussion, we will briefly evaluate the quality of the presentation as a group. Below are the criteria according to which we judge a good presentation. They were inspired by the common questionaire handed out to ETHZ students where they are asked to evaluate their professors.

Schedule of Presentations

  date title presenter material
  2005/10/26 ZigBee Patrice Oehen slides [pdf]
  2005/11/02 Task Assignment Thibaut Britz slides [pdf]
  2005/11/09 Decentralized User Authentication Max Meisterhans slides [pdf] [ppt]
  2005/11/16 Improving Gnutella Willy Henrique Säuberli slides [pdf] [ppt]
  2005/11/23 No presentation    
  2005/11/30 Peer-to-Peer Based Spam Filtering canceled Raoul Dessovic  
  2005/12/07 Secure Routing for Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks Anna Wojtas slides [pdf] [ppt]
  2005/12/14 Glacier David Scheiner slides [pdf]
  2005/12/21 Freeriders Lukas Oertle slides [pdf] [ppt]
  2006/01/11 Security in Sensor Networks Ziroli Plutschow slides [pdf]
  2006/01/18 Meridian Patrick Moor slides [pdf]
  2006/01/25 Broadcast Vijay Victor D'silva slides [pdf]
  2006/02/01 Compact Routing Schemes for Dynamic Ring Networks Jonas Rutishauser slides [pdf]
  2006/02/08 Ultra-Wideband Remo Marti slides [pdf]

Suggested Papers

  title type mentor assigned
  Broadcast (2 papers)
A Lower Bound for Radio Broadcast. [pdf]
N. Alon, A. Bar-Noy, N. Linial, D. Peleg; J. of Computer and System Sciences, 1991
On the Time-Complexity of Broadcast in Multi-Hop Radio Networks. [pdf]
R. Bar-Yehuda, O. Goldreich, A. Itai; J. of Computer and System Sciences, 1992
 * Regina O'Dell
  Compact Routing Schemes for Dynamic Ring Networks. [pdf]
D. Krizanc, F. L. Luccio, R. Raman; Theory of Computing Systems, 2004
  Regina O'Dell
  Decentralized User Authentication in a Global File System. [pdf]
M. Kaminsky, G. Savvides, D. Mazières, M. F. Kaashoek; SOSP 2003
  Keno Albrecht
  Freeriders (3 papers)
Incentives in BitTorrent Induce Free Riding. [pdf]
S. Jun, M. Ahamad; SIGCOMM 2005
Influences on Cooperation in BitTorrent Communities. [pdf]
N. Andrade, M. Mowbray, A. Lima, G. Wagner, M. Ripeanu; SIGCOMM 2005
A New Mechanism for the Free-rider Problem. [pdf]
S. Sanghavi, B. Hajek; SIGCOMM 2005
  Pascal von Rickenbach
  Glacier: Highly Durable, Decentralized Storage Despite Massive Correlated Failures. [pdf]
A. Haeberlen, A. Mislove, P. Druschel; NSDI 2005
  Keno Albrecht
  Improving Gnutella (3 papers)
Making Gnutella-like P2P Systems Scalable. [pdf]
Y. Chawathe, S. Ratnasamy, L. Breslau, N. Lanham, S. Shenker; SIGCOMM 2003
Peer-to-Peer Overlays: Structured, Unstructured, or Both? [ps]
M. Castro, M. Costa, A. Rowstron; MSR-TR-2004-73 2004
Should We Build Gnutella on a Structured Overlay? [pdf]
M. Castro, M. Costa, A. Rowstron; HotNets-II 2004
  Stefan Schmid
  Meridian: A Lightweight Network Location Service without Virtual Coordinates. [pdf]
E. G. Sirer, A. Slivkins, B. Wong; ACM SIGCOMM 2005
  Thomas Moscibroda
  Peer-to-Peer Based Spam Filtering
Give an overview and some interesting details on spam filtering based on P2P decisions. You can use the following paper as a starting point. We expect you to find more on your own.
Approximate Object Location and Spam Filtering on Peer-to-Peer Systems. [pdf]
F. Zhou, L. Zhuang, B. Y. Zhao, L. Huang, A. D. Joseph, J. Kubiatowicz; Middleware 2003
  Andreas Wetzel
  Secure Routing for Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks. [pdf]
M. Castro and P. Drushel and A. Ganesh and A. Rowstron and D. Wallach; OSDI 2002
  Stefan Schmid
  Security in Sensor Networks (3 papers)
Designing Secure Sensor Networks. [pdf]
E. Shi, A. Perrig; Wireless Communications, 2004
PIKE: Peer Intermediaries for Key Establishment in Sensor Networks. [pdf]
H. Chan, A. Perrig; Infocom 2005
Security in wireless sensor networks. [pdf]
A. Perrig, J. Stankovic, D. Wagner; Wireless Sensor Networks, 2004
  Pascal von Rickenbach
  Task Assignment with Unknown Duration. [ps]
M. Harchol-Balter; J. of the ACM, 2002
  Roland Flury
  Ultra-Wideband (3 papers)
Ultra-Wideband Radio Technology: Potential and Challenges Ahead. [pdf]
D. Porcino, W. Hirt; IEEE Communications Magazine, 2003
Ultra-Wideband Technology for Short- or Medium-Range Wireless Communications. [pdf]
J. Foerster, E. Green, S. Somayazulu, D. Leeper; Intel Technology Journal Q2, 2001
Ultra Wideband Technology Update at Spring 2003 IDF. [pdf]
J. M. Wilson; Intel DeveloperUPDATEMagazine, 2003
  Michael Kuhn
  ZigBee: An Overview of the Upcoming Standard.
Give an introduction to the ZigBee standard focusing on its techincal aspects. A good starting point for information about ZigBee is www.zigbee.org
  Nicolas Burri