Your term paper will be an individual project. The maximum length of your paper is 6 pages (single-column) or 3 pages (double-column) using a font size of 11 pt. If you choose the double-column format, it is recommended that you use an ACM or IEEE template. Each student must write his/her own term paper with his/her own sentences, analytical thinking, and ideas. Copying and pasting from someone else's paper, published or not, will constitute plagiarism. The use of someone else's phrases or sentences should be attributed and shown as a quotation. Also, your paper should be written only for this class and not be used to satisfy the requirement of another past or present class.
Begin by looking over the table of contents of the following conference proceedings for the past two years (2011 and 2012): SIGCOMM, ICNP, ICDCS, SIGMETRICS, NSDI, IMC, INFOCOM, and CoNext. Select a paper on a topic that is relevant to this class and addresses a problem of interest to you. From its list of references, or using Google Scholar, find at least two related papers for you to study and understand the topic very well.
(You can get free downloads of papers in ACM and IEEE conference proceedings via the UT-Austin Libraries website: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/index.php .)
The objective of your writing is to motivate and explain a technical problem and the key ideas of its solution method(s) to other computer scientists who do not know much about the problem. Your paper should be a narrative in your own words providing your insights from reading the selected and related papers and thinking about the issues and ideas therein. Note that if you only summarize/paraphrase the selected and related papers, your term paper would not receive a very good grade.
You can reuse some illustrations and figures in papers if they are necessary for your narrative. You must cite the source of each instance of reuse and be very selective. The following list is intended to help you organize your thinking. There is no need for you to address every item on the list.
Motivation of the problem - Why is it important? What is the new concern of interest in application or in theory?
Description of the technical problem - Is it an original problem formulation for a new application? If not, what is already known about the problem and its solution prior to your selected paper.
Description and explanation of the key idea(s) and
method(s) used to solve the problem: What is the justification, in the form of
discussion/mathematical analysis/experimental results, of the effectiveness
of the proposed solution? Are the assumptions reasonable?
Ideas