This innovative practice WIP paper presents our work to increase student motivation and engagement using real-world projects. Specifically, we assigned final projects to students that came from a genuine need from our research program on campus. The team projects were assigned in a networking course offered to undergraduate and graduate students. Anecdotally, the students seemed more motivated to complete the projects because they knew the requested designs were novel and provided local utility. Student performance toward project completion was, anecdotally, exceptional compared to traditional projects. We surveyed students to assess their perceptions of their mo-tivation and subsequent engagement. The survey results suggest that the students perceived what we also perceived: students had more motivation from these types of projects than the typical contrived recycled projects typically assigned. In this paper, we provide the details behind these projects, how we managed the students to complete them, how we attempted to make the process mirror a commercial environment, and analyze the results of the student survey data. We also outline our experimental design to be executed in future course offerings to better understand how student motivation and engagement is affected by these types of projects in comparison with typical contrived recycled projects. Lastly, we outline how we intend to scale up across campuses and to create an experiential learning environment outside of formal course work.

This work in progress research paper describes the findings of an anonymous survey modeled after the persistence in engineering survey instrument that we conducted a decade apart in 2014 and 2024. Significant changes in the mid-2010s to the mid-2020s have altered course delivery and resulting student perceptions, and we find statistically significant differences for program persistence, student self-perceived performance, perceived course value, course enjoyment, self-perceived learning gains, and self-perceived learning material engagement efforts. Interestingly, we did not find significant differences between the two groups with respect to self-reported time spent on different course activities or general student population characteristics, such as self-reported credits, GPA, work hours, or commutes. When considering the averaged changes, we note that students in the more recent blended and virtualized environments exhibit a higher level of persistence than their peers. This showcases the overall increase of blended and decentralized/virtualized instruction having a positive impact on student attitudes based on the feedback collected.

This work in progress innovative practice paper details our open source approach, which directly addresses new challenges to equitable access and privacy originating from increased technology-driven learning. We provide results from the Technology Acceptance Model's anonymous survey approach for a second-year introductory networking and a fourth-year operating systems course that employed the environment with comparable respondent characteristics. Although perceived ease of use and perceived use are in the middle of possible ranges, we find an interesting reversal for the network course, where student attitudes are low despite high perceptions. Future work will be directed at further refinements of the framework and a more in-depth evaluation of the privacy concerns that students might have and whether these could be included in the Technology Accentance Model.

This paper describes our universally applicable approach to the gathering of learning process data to support learning analytics with the ultimate goal of generating actionable intelligence for learners and instructors. This support is needed as increasingly, course content is provided in an online environment (independent of a class delivery modality, e.g., face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online) where learners are operating independently and in absence of timely feedback loops. Providing learners with automatically generated feedback can stimulate their self-regulation toward success. Specifically, we describe an approach that generates learning process analytics dashboard data that are driven by clickstream data. Our approach enables the gathering of learning process data outside the Learning Management System (LMS) confines to support the generation of models that can produce actionable intelligence and enable deeper exploration options for the instructor. Our approach thus enables continuous education improvement and its operationalization (EdOps).

In this paper, we describe and experimentally evaluate the performance of our Network Link Outlier Factor (NLOF) for detecting soft-failures in communication networks. The NLOF is computed using the throughput values derived from NetFlow records. The flow throughput values are clustered in two stages, outlier values are determined within each cluster, and the flow outliers are used to compute the outlier factor or score for each network link. When sampling NetFlow records across the full span of a network, NLOF enables the detection of soft-failures across the span of the network; large NLOF scores correlate well with links experiencing failure.

We analyze the conditions in which offloading computation reduces completion time. We extend the existing literature by deriving an inequality that relates computation offloading system parameters to the bits per instruction ratio of a computational job. This ratio is the inverse of the arithmetic intensity. We then discuss how this inequality can be used to determine the computations that can benefit from offloading as well as the computation offloading systems required to make offloading beneficial for particular computations.

In a hybrid PON/xDSL access network, multiple customer premise equipment (CPE) nodes connect over individual digital subscriber lines (DSLs) to a drop-point device. The drop-point device, which is typically reverse powered from the customer, is co-located with an optical network unit (ONU) of the passive optical network (PON). We demonstrate that the drop-point experiences very high buffer occupancies when no flow control or standard Ethernet PAUSE frame flow control is employed. In order to reduce the buffer occupancies in the drop-point, we introduce two gated flow control protocols that extend the polling-based PON medium access control to the DSL segments between the CPEs and the ONUs. We analyze the timing of the gated flow control mechanisms to specify the latest possible time instant when CPEs can start the DSL upstream transmissions so that the ONU can forward the upstream transmissions at the full PON upstream transmission bit rate. Through extensive simulations for a wide range of bursty traffic models, we find that the gated flow control mechanisms, specifically, the ONU and CPE grant sizing policies, enable effective control of the maximum drop-point buffer occupancies.

We are experimentally conducting a fine-grain comparative analysis of two different methods of producing pre-recorded lectures versus a traditional live lecture. The two different pre-recorded lecture production methods do not require assistance from university staff members and therefore represent a low-cost approach. The first method is generating narrated slides using PowerPoint during a live lecture and the second method is the recording of a live lecture from the instructor's point of view using a head mounted camera such as Google's Glass. We present some of our preliminary results of this comparative analysis, which indicate that little interactions exist overall between the implemented modus of presenting instructional materials and the observed student learning gains within the study configuration. Thus, as a preliminary indicator within our study confines, instructors are enabled to select the most convenient fashion of lecture presentation. We are presently expanding our set of experiments (different cohorts, different specific subject matter, etc.) to obtain broader conclusions.

Investigating the Internet's topology is one component towards developing mechanisms that can protect the communication infrastructure underlying our critical systems and applications. We study the feasibility of capturing and fitting Internet's topology snapshots to an emulated environment called Deterlab. Physical limitations on Deterlab include the number of nodes available (i.e., about 400) and the number of interfaces (i.e., 4) to interconnect them. For example, one Internet's topology snapshot at the Autonomous Systems (AS) level has about 100 nodes with 5 nodes requiring more than 4 interfaces. In this paper, we present a short summary of the Internet's topology snapshots collected and propose a solution on how we can represent the snapshots in Deterlab and overcome the limitation of nodes requiring more than four interfaces. Preliminary results show that all paths from snapshots are maintained if a node requiring more than four interfaces had no more than four other nodes requiring four interfaces. Also, we constructed a proof of concept that captures the main idea of using then snapshots in a security experiment in Deterlab. The topology shows a Multiple Origin Autonomous System (MOAS) conflict for 10 nodes. It is scalable to larger topologies in Deterlab because we have automated the topology creation and protocol configuration.

We investigate upstream transmission coordination for PON/xDSL hybrid access networks. We introduce a novel GATED flow control mechanism to reduce the upstream buffering at the optical network unit (drop point) that bridges the fiber and copper transmission media. We provide extensive experimental analysis of various flow control mechanisms including our novel GATED flow control.

We introduce a convenient notational framework for Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) algorithms in Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) that uses the three principal axes of grant scheduling framework, grant sizing, and grant scheduling policy. We conduct comprehensive stability limit and packet delay investigations to determine which components have the strongest impact on these measures. We find that the grant sizing has the strongest impact on the delay and the combined grant scheduling framework and policy have the strongest impact on the stability limit. Further, we find that among the wide set of DBA algorithms we examined the shortest propagation delay first grant scheduling policy coupled with the limited with excess distribution grant sizing provides both the lowest delay and highest stability limit. The performance of shortest propagation delay first grant scheduling policy coupled with the limited with excess distribution grant sizing exceeds that of the online scheduling framework with limited grant sizing.

We analyze the use of caching of video frames at network routers for reducing average retransmission delay. We formulate an expression for the average retransmission delay using video caching routers. In turn, we use this expression to formulate a mathematical program to minimize the average retransmission delay. We find a dynamic programming solution to the resultant non-linear convex binary integer program. We compare the results obtained from the dynamic programming solution with those obtained via experimental exhaustive enumeration. The experimental results validate our models and dynamic programming solution. Finally, we use numerical analysis to quantify the retransmission delay difference between the best and worst caching router placements. Our findings show that the optimal placement of caching routers can significantly reduce cost by minimizing the number of caching routers required to meet a desired retransmission delay performance. Furthermore, our dynamic programming solution shows that such optimal placement can be efficiently determined from network parameters, without an exhaustive search.

Due to the geographic distribution of its subscribers, Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) have typically varying propagation delays between the Optical Network Units (ONUs) and the Optical Line Terminal (OLT). In this paper, we consider EPONs with an offline scheduling framework, which enables Quality-of-Service mechanisms by collecting bandwidth requests from all ONUs before the OLT makes dynamic bandwidth allocations for transmissions on the shared ONUs-to- OLT upstream channel. We propose and evaluate the Shortest Propagation Delay (SPD) first scheduling policy which sequences the ONUs' upstream transmissions in increasing order of the ONUs' propagation delays, i.e., the upstream transmission of the ONU with the smallest propagation delay is scheduled first. We formally analyze the competitiveness of SPD first scheduling and find that it achieves very close to optimal performance. We characterize the stability limit for Gated and Limited grant sizing in conjunction with SPD grant scheduling. We evaluate the cycle length and packet delay with SPD scheduling through probabilistic analysis and simulations and find significant reductions in packet delay with SPD first scheduling in EPONs with heterogeneous propagation delays, especially when Limited grant sizing is employed.

We propose an improved online scheduler for multichannel or Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) upstream transmission. This scheduler employs a just-in-time online scheduling framework to increase the number of Optical Network Units (ONUs) that can be scheduled concurrently. We outline the overall structure of this scheduling framework and discuss adapting offline scheduling policies for use in this framework. We compare the average queueing delay performance of different schedulers that follow this new framework to a simple online scheduler that schedules ONUs as soon as their REPORTS are received at the Optical Line Terminal (OLT). Further, we show how this framework can be used to provide differentiated service to ONUs without waiting for all ONUs to REPORT. We conclude with some remarks regarding our performance findings and possibilities for future research.