Survey paper

Guidelines of a survey-based course paper

Begin by looking over the technical programs of the following conference proceedings for the past few years:  SIGCOMM, ICNP, ICDCS, IEEE Security and Privacy, ACM CCS, USENIX Security, NDSS, NSDI, 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.

Format: 11pt single column, 7-8 pages. 

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 to improve upon the existing solution(s) or generalize the problem formulaton, its model, or its application.

  • Shortcomings of current work, if any.