Elements that must be included in the 2 or 3-page project proposal draft:

• Title
• Motivation:
  Why you think this topic is important? why is this a significant area of research? What are the main problems in this area? and why do you think your proposal is important for the topic?
• Related Work:
  What other researchers have proposed earlier to address the above problems? What were their results and conclusions? Why you think you still need to do work in this area (i.e., what are the shortcomings/pitfalls of earlier work?) What do you propose that is different from related work? and what do you propose that is similar? Clarify how your ideas address the shortcomings of earlier work. Provide adequate and proper citations of related work.
• Proposal Body:
  • Problem statement:
    State very clearly and very specifically the question(s) that you attempt to answer (Be as clear and as specific as you can). You can list the questions but add an introduction sentence to link the questions and tell the whole story.
  • Evaluation metrics:
    Mention very clearly and as specific as possible the evaluation criteria and metrics you intend to use to evaluate your approach and ideas. Examples of evaluation metric may include 'overhead' (need to clarify what overhead is and how is it measured), response delay (how to measure it), etc.
  • Investigated Parameter Space:
    Mention the design space investigated in the study. For example, a popularity threshold of 5-50 with steps of 5 could be a design space investigated for the SDS promotion scheme. Another example may be random selection of contacts, selection based on stability measures (need to define what stability is and what are the limits investigated).
  • Methodology:
    Graph theory, finite state machines, queueing theory, network simulation, mathematical modeling or experimentation are some examples of the methodology. Mention which of the methodologies will be used and why. Elaborate on the tool used, if any. For example, network simulator (NS-2) or GlomoSim may be used as network simulators. Also, elaborate on the existing capabilities of the tools and what needs to be modified or augmented to suit your analysis.
  • Scenarios:
    Include topologies (network size, connectivity, etc.), traffic and multicast membership patterns (if any), network failures, packet loss patterns, mobility models/degrees that will be used to evaluate the protocol. Explain your choise of the above parameters.
  • Expected results:
    Show what change in performance/evaluation you would gain by using your approach (as opposed to previous work). At this stage, show only expected/anticipated results or trends and justify your prediction. (It would also help to provide graphs with explanation of the x and y (and other!) axes).
• References: Around 6 references of high quality per project.