CS 854: Advanced Topics in Computer Systems

Experimental Performance Evaluation

Fall 2022

 

 

 

 

 

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Mini Assignment: Measuring the Performance of a WiFi Network

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UPDATES
Tue Sep 13 15:06:08 EDT 2022 Presentations will be limited to a maximum of 7 minutes each.

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This assignment is meant to help you understand some of the issues you might face when conducting an experiment and to motivate some of the problems we'll explore in this class.

• Conduct experiments in which you try to obtain the maximum possible throughput from a WiFi network. For example you could measure ONE OF the following networks:
  • eduroam (on campus or part of campus housing)
  • your apartment or home WiFi network
  • a public space network (e.g., at Williams Cafe, Starbucks, Timmy's, or McDonalds)
• Try to determine the maximum speed (throughput) you are able to obtain when connected to the network. Please report all speeds in Mbps (megabits per second) where 1 megabit is 1,000,000 bits (not 1024 * 1024 bits). That way we have a standardized measure and we can more easily compare across experiments by different people.
• NOTE: This is not meant to be an exhaustive study and remember THIS IS WILL NOT BE GRADED. The purpose is to get you to run some experiments and to start thinking about and exploring some of the issues that will be discussed in this class.
• Please work individually as much as possible as there will be more to learn from a diverse set of experiments than if everyone ends up conducting the same experiments. It will also make the presentations more interesting.
• Create a presentation that will be given in the next class.
• You don't need to report on / explain all experiments you run. It is OK to run some experiments that don't make it into your presentation.

Logistics

It is critical that you follow these instructions carefully. With lots of students in the class the overhead of dealing with people who don't follow the instructions is too high to cope with. I have software that automatically grabs the submissions and files from my mail. If you don't follow the instructions I won't get your submission.

• READ ALL OF THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST (MULTIPLE TIMES) AND THEN FOLLOW THEM. For some reason, every year, a few students fail to follow the instructions.
• Send me the PDF as an email attachment prior to the deadline in the course schedule.
• Your filename must be all lower case and contain (in order) your given name, a dash, and the first letter of your family name. For example, my filename would be tim-b.pdf Send the file as an attachment using the following subject line:
  Subject: CS854 Assignment
• I will have all presentations available for sharing on my system to prevent problems and timing delays with change overs between presentations.

Assignment Presentation

• Presentations will be done live.
• They will be roughly max(140/N) minutes each (where N is the number of presentations).
• They MUST BE DONE IN POINT FORM
• You MUST email me the PDF (follow the instructions carefully).
• All presentations must have a least one slide containing each of the 5 headings below. The bullet points outlined below each heading are meant to provide you with some guidance. You must be sure to include these as a minimum but also feel free to include other important issues/aspects. It is fine to have some of these topics spread across more than one slide (e.g., see the tips below about using large fonts, etc.)
  1. Environment
     • What hardware and software was used?
  2. Methodology
     • What is the metric of performance?
     • What experiments did you conduct and why?
     • How were the experiments performed?
  3. Findings
     • What results did you get?
  4. Issues Faced / Lessons Learned
  5. Outstanding Questions / Problems

Some Tips for Preparing and Giving Your Talk

• Use large fonts (24 pt minimum -- even on graphs and figures)
• Don't use large headers/titles for your slides, the defaults provided by Powerpoint templates are particularily bad. They often use 1/4 to 1/3 of the slide (this wastes lots of valuable slide space)
• A technical talk is different from a business talk.
• Don't include info unless you can use it.
• Figure out how long it takes you to give your talk
• Plan what you want to say in your M minutes (e.g., what is your main point)
• Eliminate anything extra
• Use bullet points / point form only
  No sentences
  If you have lots of text, the readers will begin reading the long text to see what it says and by the time they are finished reading it you will have lost them. In fact they may not be done reading the slide by the time you have moved onto the next slide and then they will be lost. They might get distracted, e.g., wondering if the use of "onto" above is correct or if it should be "on to". They are also likely get bored and stop following the talk just like what is happening now when you are reading all of this text :-)
• You want the audience listening to you rather than reading the slides!
• Proof read your slides.
• Number the slides so if there are questions they can be referred to by number.

 

 

 

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Last modified: Fri Oct 21 15:47:22 EDT 2022