CSE 40771 Measurement Project
The goal of the first project is exercise and develop your skills as a scientist.
In this project, you will select a technology that underlies the TeamTrak distributed
system, conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation, and write
a lab report that gives a general overview of the technology and presents your results.
A secondary goal of this project is to get you acquainted with the TeamTrak equipment
and software so that you will be prepared to undertake the second (engineering) project. Some ideas for projects are given here.
Begin by collecting reference materials. You should have a very detailed understanding
of how your sensor or communication device works, and be able to clearly explain the details
to others. Make good use of the library, reference manuals that come with the device,
and online materials as appropriate.
(Note, An online encyclopedia like Wikipedia is a good place to start looking for materials,
but it is by nature unreliable, and must not be used as an only source. Strive to find
sources that have an author with a name that is willing to take credit or blame for
his or her writing.)
Each project idea asks you to explore a simple question, such as
"What is the range of an ad-hoc ethernet network?" However, this question
is much too vague: certainly, the range of the network changes with a variety
of conditions: indoors vs outdoors, arrangement of the antennas, intervening obstacles, and so forth.
Your job as a scientist is to refine the vague question into three to five more specific questions.
We will discuss this process in class.
For each question, you should conduct a careful quantitative experiment.
You should employ sound scientific practices that you have learned in earlier class,
such as recording all data, repeating measurements multiple times, and reporting
a mean and standard deviation for each experiment. You should plan to conduct
three to five distinct experiments for this project. (The technically easier projects should have five,
while the technically harder may have three.)
To report your experimental results, you will produce a carefully written lab report.
The paper should be written in 10 point, two column text,
with one inch margin on all sides. Each section of the paper (described below)
should be clearly labeled with a section header. Don't get fancy with
the fonts, styles, etc. Just focus on the writing. The paper should have the following sections:
Title - A plainly-stated description of what the paper measures, with respect to the independent variable. For example: "Measurement of the Range of CB Radio Under Varying Weather Conditions"
Abstract - A carefully written one paragraph summary of the paper.
A good abstract tells the reader exactly what the paper is about, and
exactly what its conclusions are in very short order. A researcher
searching for a particular result in many papers will use the abstract
to determine if the rest of the paper is worth reading.
Hint: Write the abstract once the rest of the paper is finished.
Summarize each major section of the paper using one crisp sentence per section.
Introduction. (About one page, including the abstract.) Explain the overall purpose,
method, and results of the paper, without getting to bogged down in
the details. The introduction should give the reader a sense of why
the measurement is useful to know, and present a mental guide for the
rest of the paper.
Hint: Write the introduction once the rest of the paper (except the abstract)
is complete. Summarize each major section of the paper using one
paragraph per section.
Background. (About one page.) Describe the system that you are going to measure
in terms accessible to any engineer.
Include a sketch of your own devising that shows and labels the major
components of the system, and their interaction.
Describe the architecture, and the communication steps involved in the basic
operation. Pay particular attention to how resources are discovered
and named. For example, if you are measuring the accuracy of a GPS
receiver, describe the GPS satellites, the format of the data broadcast
by each satellite, and the computation used to determine the receiver's
position.
Method. (About one page.) Describe what you are going to measure,
and how you are going to measure it. Be specific enough
that anyone reading the paper could reproduce your results.
For each experiment that you conduct, state:
The rationale and goal of the experiment.
The precise equipment and model numbers used.
The exact procedure used to carry out the experiment.
The method for measuring and collecting data, whether writing to a log file, reading an instrument, or observing something with the naked eye.
Results. (About 2-3 pages of text and figures.) Present the data collected for each experiment
in the previous section, using an appropriate device such
as a graph, a scatter plot, or a table of numbers.
Be sure to clearly label all figures with descriptive
captions, labels, and units.
Discuss the significance of the results.
Perhaps the results show that certain variables
(equipment, geography, barriers) affect
the quantity under study (range, accuracy, performance).
Perhaps some variables do not affect the quantity of interest.
Conclusions. (A few paragraphs.) Briefly recapitulate
the purpose of the experiments and the highlights of the results
that you produced. For example, if you produced gobs of data regarding the
range of a CB radio, you might restate them simply as "The maximum range
on a clear sunny day is 10 miles, but could be as bad as 10 meters in
the middle of a snowstorm."