Winter Semester 2007/08
Bachelor- and Master Seminars
In preparation for your bachelor- or master thesis we offer bachelor- and master seminars. These seminars do combine the preparation of a special research topic incl. structured literature research and state-of-the-art analysis with learning the documentation and presentation skills needed in every industrial or academic job.
Bachelor- and master seminars are recommended or even mandatory in various study programs and will be dimensioned and credited appropriately. You will have to participate in regular meetings (biweekly during the semester, monthly during lecture free periods) and present your results to your peers.
Prerequisites: Bachelor- and master seminars are directly related to the prospective bachelor- resp. master thesis and therefore do require that you have all necessary requirements for starting the respective thesis. In addition you must have been donated a thesis topic by the telecommunications lab. Matlab experience, hearing or having heard Telecommunications 1 (+ Telecommunications 2 in case of master seminar) is strongly recommended.
Main Seminar: “Audio/Visual Peer2Peer Networks”
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks earned many discredit because of being used for file sharing of copyrighted content by millions of internet users. But in recent times providers of digital media content and audiovisual communication networks experience the P2P paradigm as a new perspective for disseminating their services on the internet.
For the distribution of audiovisual media to a large audience, traditionally broadcast has been the preferred method. Multicasting was established as the more reasonable counterpart to broadcasting based on the Internet Protocol (IP). Unfortunately, most of the hardware infrastructure building up the internet does not support IP multicast features. On the other hand, sending broadband audiovisual services such as digital TV to any subscriber via unicast creates a lot of excess bandwidth compared to broadcast or multicast delivery.
In order to achieve the “one-to-many” principle of broadcasting, P2P emerged as a very promising architecture not only suitable for file transfer (e.g. BitTorrent, Gnutella, Emule) and distributed computing (e.g. Seti@Home, CERN-Data-Grid) but also for the distribution of real-time media. However, applying P2P techniques to real-time audiovisual transmissions requires them to cope with time constraints and synchronization problems.
Purpose: This seminar covers the basic functionality of (audiovisual) P2P networks. It introduces selected applications of P2P in voice, audio, and video transmission such as Skype, Peercast, Coolstreaming/DONet and the recently launched Zattoo. Hereby, mainly the enhancements required for the real-time media distribution are addressed. In addition, the underlying theory of P2P networks will be investigated. Overlay networks, network coding, hashing and other elementary techniques will be introduced.
During the seminar you will gain experience in literature search as well as in elaborating one subtopic in form of a written report and an oral presentation.
Core lecture (Stammvorlesung): Telecommunications I / Digital Transmission and Signal Processing (Nachrichtentechnik I / Digitale Übertragungstechnik & Signalverarbeitung)
Remark: The course can be given in English in case this will be recommended by the participants in the first lesson.
Digital Signal Transmission and Signal Processing refreshes the foundation that you have layed in “Signals and Systems / Signale und Systeme”. We will, however, include the respective basics so that the various facettes of your introductory study period (Bachelor in Computer Science, Vordiplom Computer und Kommunikationstechnik, Elektrotechnik oder Mechatronik) and the potential main study period (Master in Computer Science, Diplom Ingenieur Computer und Kommunikationstechnik oder Mechatronik) will be payed respect to.
As the basic principle the course will give an introduction into the various building blocks that modern telecommunication systems do incorporate. Sources, sinks, source and channel coding, modulation and multiplexing are the major keywords but we will also deal with dedicated pieces like A/D- and D/A-converters and quantizers in a little bit more depth.
The course will refresh the basic transformations (Fourier, Laplace) that give access to system analysis in the frequency domain, it will introduce derived transoformations (z, Hilbert) for the anylysis of discrete systems and modulation schemes and it will briefly introduce algebra on finite fields to systematicly deal with error correction schemes that play an important role in modern communication systems.
Required Education: “Digital Transmission and Signal Processing” is a course during the main study period and by such requires a solid foundation of mathematics (differential and integral calculus) and probability theory. The course will, however, refresh those areas indispensibly necessary for telecommunications and potential intensification courses and by this open this potential field of intensification to everyone of you.