Due to the COVID-19 epidemy, with so many working and studying remotely, the Internet’s capacity is under considerable strain. Unfortunately, this has put a huge load on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and we can only expect the situation to worsen with time. The latest statistics indicate that the throughput in the network during daytime business hours has seen a surge of over 102 percent as compared to the usage in last week of February. While ISPs are coming up with short-term solutions to provide as much capacity as possible, a more permanent solution is required to cater Internet’s future growth and demands. Therefore, as a permanent solution for the capacity problem, researchers are investigating possible reengineering/redesigning of the traditional TCP/IP protocol suite.
TCP/IP was originally designed for wide area network, even though it has been used in local area network mostly, it’s not optimised for it. For example, though CRC is used for checksum, TCP still uses in-packet checksum for endto-end reliability, which is an overhead considering that computing the checksum is expensive and resource intensive, leading to a bottleneck in the network.
Task 1: You must familiarize yourself with the current literature published under the above topic. Therefore, you must first perform a literature survey. Publications can be accessed via UC Library’s A-Z Databases. A recommended database for this task is IEEE Xplore. If you have difficulties in remotely accessing the UC Library databases, please contact the library and they will be able to help you. If you are unable to access UC Library databases as recommended, Google Scholar may be an alternative option. However, not all documents from Google Scholar can be considered as peer-reviewed publications from legitimate sources. Next (Task 2), you may proceed with the designing of your novel architecture.
Task 2: Your task is to propose a fix/solution to the TCP/IP protocol suite to help the Internet overcome its capacity bottleneck/s. For example, you may focus on fixing a specific problem at a particular layer of the protocol stack or improving a known deficiency of a protocol or propose a completely novel method to improve network capacity based on the knowledge you have gained from the unit. You have complete freedom to design a solution to improve the capacity of the Internet. Remember, less is more: simple solutions are the best solutions.
It should give readers enough information to appreciate your specific objectives within a larger theoretical framework. A helpful strategy in this section is to go from the general, theoretical framework to your specific question. Remember to present only the most relevant ideas and get quickly to the point of the paper. After placing your work in a broader context, you should state the specific question(s) to be answered.
I. Literature Review (750 Words)
This section may include background information about the problem such as a summary of any research that has been done on the problem in the past and how the present experiment will help to clarify or expand the knowledge in this general area. All background information gathered from other published sources must, of course, be appropriately cited in IEEE referencing format.
II. Design And Methodology (750 Words)
The author describes the proposed solution to the problem identified in the Introduction. You must clearly state the originality of your proposal and what novel contributions your design brings to the body of knowledge. The author describes the architectural design, the apparatus, methods of gathering data and type of control. The general rule to remember is that the Materials and Methods section should be detailed and clear enough so that any reader knowledgeable in basic scientific techniques could duplicate the study if she/he wished to do so.
III. Discussion (500 Words)
If available, here the researcher presents summarized data for inspection using narrative text and, where appropriate, tables and figures to display summarized data. You must clearly put forward a discussion to justify the originality of your proposal and how it solves the identified problem. Next discuss how your solution is superior than the state-of- the-art by benchmarking it against at least two other similar published works. Finally, clearly state your contributions to the body ofknowledge. A useful strategy in discussing your proposed solution is to relate your specific results back to the broad theoretical context presented in the Introduction. Since your Introduction went from the general to a specific question, going from the specific back to the general will help to tie your ideas and arguments together.
