Help me pick a topic. (IT related)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I need a topic for my data communications class. Topics already taken include ethernet, cellular communication, wifi and bluetooth. It doesn’t need to be about a protocol per se, just a topic in the field of data communications.

I also need to do an assignment on an Operating System. One with available whitepapers and that is not too complex (IE: no windows vista). It can be any kind of O.S, desktop, embedded, medical devices, etc.

I’m not saying I can’t find any on my own. I’ve just not found anything that truly captured my heart and soul. I have no doubt you will succeed where I have failed!*
*And by that I mean it’ll be a miracle if this thread gets any answers.

Thank you for your time,

/Gozu

2

How about VOIP?

3

Taken already. Good suggestion though, I’d have liked that.

4

How about Suse Linux as your O/S. RedHat is much more popular in the U.S., but Suse is pretty big in other parts of the world. Or could you do a historical OS? Writing about something like CP/M would be kindof fun.

Topics in data communications - how about internet worms? MPLS? IPv6?

5

You might find WiMAX very interesting. I prefer studying the business/social side of things more than tech, so YMMV.

…NOT that the tech side of it is uninteresting. I just enjoy thinking of the implications of this technology on communications.

I’m sure you know what WiMAX is, but a wiki link wouldn’t hurt.

6

Op system?

z/OS

7

OK, so I do - I’ve been messing with it since X.25 was a hot item…

Sounds like the low-hanging fruit has been picked already, but here’s a few items that could make for interesting papers:

  • Jump from Layer2 to Layer 3/4 and do a paper on IP. Depending on the ambition level, you can cover IP itself, with excursions into TCP and UDP. Dig into the header fields, what they’re for, what design considerations led to them etc. Cover ICMP, too - ICMP is misunderstood and underappreciated. (This is useful stuff to know for anyone in IT, by the way.) Add some commented protocol analyzer traces for that extra “attention-to-detail” credit.

  • Routing protocols, if you want to be ambitious. BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, RIP, IS-IS. Heady stuff, admittedly. Dig into what tables are maintained for what protocol, how the different protocols communicate routing information to each other. Link-state, distance-vector, Dijkstra’s algorithm for shortest path calculation, CIDR etc.

  • Security/VPN. Encryption, key exchange, tunneling. Firewalls, monitoring.

  • Or move to a higher abstraction level and do Network Design - describe topology & technology to support an enterprise network - user LAN, server LAN, WAN, DMZ, load balancers, firewalls, intrusion detection. Core layer, aggregation layer, access layer - what elements do what, where do they go, why?

Cisco has some pretty good white papers available for free.