Project Ideas

How can you pick a good research project topic? Your taste for projects will evolve over years, but to get started, here are a few places to look.

Lists of open problems

• Our class list of suggested project ideas
• Forty Data Communications Research Questions (Partridge, CCR 2011)

Workshops and conferences

• Browse programs at the top conferences to see current research topics.
• Workshops often contain early work on "hot" new directions, raising more questions than answers. Browse the SIGCOMM or NSDI sites to see workshops attached to the main conferences. See, for example:
  • HotNets
  • HotCloud
  • SIGCOMM 2012 workshops:
    • CellNet
    • HotSDN
    • MedCOMM
    • Mobile Gaming
    • Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN)
    • Information-Centric Networking
    • Mobile Cloud Computing
    • Workshop on Measurements Up and Down the STack (W-MUST)
  • HotOS
  • DIMACS Workshop on Software Defined Networking (December 2012)

Survey papers

• The Cost of a Cloud: Research Problems in Data Center Networks (Albert Greenberg, James Hamilton, David A. Maltz, Parveen Patel)
• Cloud Computing: Recent trends, challenges and open problems (Andres Lagar-Cavilla and Kaustubh Joshi tutorial at SIGMETRICS 2011; PPT handout available)
• Security for Cloud Computing (Nahrstedt and Campbell, workshop report including some open problems)
• Hypervisors as a Foothold for Personal Computer Security: An Agenda for the Research Community (Matei Zaharia, Sachin Katti, Chris Grier, Vern Paxson, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, and Dawn Song, 2012)