1. EXAM or ASSIGNMENT
The goal is to test the students on the textbook and/or the auxiliary book. My exams seldom require
memorisation.

2. PRESENTATIONS
We will have in class presentations of the papers.  Also, students at the end will
present their projects to me.
 

3. PROJECTS
The project will be a non-trivial original piece of work. The end result should
be at the level of a decent workshop paper.  Literature surveys are acceptable. However,
they have to be thorough, synthesize the read material, and offer an interesting perspective
on the state of the art.
I will offer several ideas for projects but identifying a topic is mainly the student's duty.
Note: In previous courses, I have been very flexible on this issue. This time I will be strict.
I will be very happy to help with the report, or explain what are the expectations
but the expectations have to be met at the end. "I didn't know that I had to go that far"
is not an excuse.

We will have projects in teams of two. The team will have to identify a project
and do a proposal within the first few weeks.
The proposal is a binding agreement: you will promise to deliver something.
The idea is that a project should be a self contained piece of work that with some
extra work could be publishable.

Literature Surveys: Literature surveys are acceptable but they should be really good surveys
to get maximum grades.
A good literature survey:
 * identify the important papers: starting from the good conferences and journals
 is a good strating point (SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, ICNP, GLOBAL INTERNET, NOSSDAV)
* synthesize the information: pure listing of papers is not a literature survey
    you have to highlight similarities, classify papers and approaches, compare them
* it has to be clear, well written, with one major topic in mind, develop
    top down (problem - main classes of approaches - subclassess of its class- etc)

A literature survey becomes someting more when it goes beyond surveying and it identifies
open problems,  proposes new methods or combination of existing methods etc.
A reasonable lit-survey typically has at least 15 papers a good one around 25
and an extensive one 30 or more. HOWEVER, these numbers are indicative:
First, it is the quality of papers that you use that matters.
Second it depends on the topic: the goal is to cover a particular subject.
 Tip: select an appropriate topic so that the amount of papers that you read are
  adequate.
Surveys just like other projects will be judged on a) topic interest, b) completeness,
c) innovation (new perspectives and insights), d) quality of writing.