© University of Melbourne 2025
COMP90007 Internet Technologies Project 2
Semester 1, 2025

Task: Literature Review on Router Queue Management for Real-Time Communication
Weighting: 15%
Due Date/Time: Group registration: May 7th (Wednesday) 5:00pm
Report submission: May 30th (Friday) 5:00pm
A late penalty of 10% per day or part thereof will be applied to submissions made after
the due date.
Task length: Maximum 8 pages for individual work, and 11 pages for group work, including figures,
appendices, and references.
The main text of the report, without figures, appendices, and references, is expected to be
no less than 4 pages.
Detailed formatting instructions are in the “Required Format” section.
Submission: Submit as a PDF document via Canvas.
Include your project title, your name(s), and student ID(s) on the submission.

Task Purpose: This project enables students to explore and critically evaluate a topic relevant to modern
networks and applications.
Router Queue Management allows the network to actively control latency and is central
to delivering high-quality real-time service in today’s internet, for example, for video,
voice, and gaming applications.
This is an opportunity for you to practice identifying relevant papers, categorising
developments in the field and comparing and critiquing them.
By the end of the task, you will be able to:
• Critically read and interpret a research article
• Compare and contrast research findings
• Write a literature review of a given research topic
Task Description: You will write a brief literature review on Router Queue Management for Real-Time
Communication.
Your focus should be on router queue management, specifically on Active Queue
Management (AQM) approaches at the network layer that improve the quality and
performance of real-time traffic, for example by minimising queuing delays, reducing
end-to-end latency, and/or prioritising real-time traffic.
You can complete the work individually or in a group of 2 (max.) of your own choice. If
working in a group of 2, please register on Canvas before the group registration deadline.
© University of Melbourne 2025
In the review, you are expected to include at least 5 papers in an individual submission or
at least 10 papers if working in a group of 2.
You are expected to reference all sources using a consistent IEEE style.
Your literature review should include the following sections.
• Introduction and background (~1- 1.5 pages)
• Classification and survey of queue management algorithms (~3 pages -
individual; ~5 pages – group of 2)
• Comparative analysis of queue management algorithms (~1 page – individual;
~2 pages – group of 2)
• Open challenges/future directions (~0.5 page)
• Conclusions (~0.5 page)
• References (~0.5 – 1 page)
Notes: The length of each section is recommended, not mandatory. The main text of the
report, without figures, appendices, and references, is expected to be not less than 4 pages.
Required
Format:
Page size A4 with 2.54cm (1-inch) margins.
Main text: 12-point Times New Roman font, single column, 1.5 line spacing, and justified
alignment.
References: All references must follow the IEEE style and be formatted in a single
column with 1.0 line spacing.
Assessment
Criteria:
Your work will be assessed on:
• Description of problem domain (2 marks)
• Synthesis and presentation of algorithm survey and categorisation (3 marks)
• Comparative analysis supported by table(s) and/or figure(s) (3 marks)
• Literature selection (2 marks)
• Future directions (2 marks)
• Concluding remarks (1 mark)
• Format and structure (1 mark)
• Referencing (1 mark)

Academic
Integrity and
Plagiarism:
All work submitted for this project must be entirely your own. This includes the writing,
analysis, classifications, and any visual or tabular material. Proper citations must be used
to attribute work where appropriate.
Individuals/teams must not:
• Share or copy text, figures, tables, diagrams, or classifications with other
students/teams.
• Collaborate on outlining or drafting their review, even informally.
• Use or adapt material from another student's/team’s work (past or present).
• Present any work that is not their own without proper attribution.
• Share information about papers found with other students/teams. This is
important because surveying the literature (i.e., finding papers) is a part of
this assessment.
Students/teams are expected to independently read, analyse, and synthesise the literature.
Submitting AI-generated content as your own work is considered deliberate cheating.
Your submissions will be examined for originality and will invoke the University’s
© University of Melbourne 2025
Academic Misconduct policy where either inappropriate level of collaboration or
plagiarism are deemed to have taken place.

Collaboration If in a group of 2, both members of the group should contribute equally to the task and
will receive the same mark. If you feel the work has been unequal, report it to your tutors.
This will be carefully reviewed, and mark adjustments may be made if necessary.

Guidelines
For a literature review, you are expected to not only list top papers in an area but also categorise these
developments/approaches and compare/critique them. This is at the core of the literature review. A list
of papers with comments only is called an “annotated bibliography” and is not the purpose of this
project. You should categorise and compare approaches from various perspectives, such as the
congestion indicator, the congestion control function, and the feedback mechanism. These criteria are
examples; you should select appropriate criteria based on the selection of papers you are focusing on.
You may also consider using clear visualisations such as figures, flow charts, and tables to present
different approaches and comparisons.
You should start by familiarising yourself with the concept of active queue management. You can do
this by looking at different sources such as the subject’s textbook, other textbooks on computer
networks, Wikipedia pages, and foundational papers. Google will give you a good range of options if
you search for “active queue management”. Following this, you should start looking for relevant papers
to incorporate in your literature review. You may initially use Google results as a starting point, but you
should rely on a scholarly publication search engine, such as scholar.google.com, to perform a more
detailed background and literature search. The number of citations a paper gets on scholar.google.com
is an indicator of its leadership in the field. It is important to note that if you log in to the University’s
library with your student credentials, you will be able to access papers that are returned by these engines
free of charge in most cases. Note that while Wikipedia is a good starting point when familiarising
yourself with the topic, it should not be cited in your review as an academic source. Doing so will attract
relevant penalties for relying on inadequate academic references.
You are encouraged to find other literature review papers (also called survey papers) that already exist
on this topic. Find one that is recent and relevant. Better, find many, and you will note that authors look
at similar but not the same set of algorithms/protocols. They may also have different classifications.
These should give you an idea of what common/popular methods exist and what key comparison
parameters you can have between solutions. They are also a good example of how to write a literature
review. However, you cannot use a literature review paper or a book as a sole source for your report
and/or directly take their approach.
The project is expected to be completed in 3-4 weeks in total. For example, the stages of your project
can be summarised as follows: Background search/reading selected papers (should not take more than
10 days and can be done in 1 week), organisation of your report/drafting key points of your sections (1
week), finishing your report (1 week). When reading the papers, please note that a technical paper is
not read like a novel, i.e., not read from cover to cover sequentially, but is read in a manner that you
can quickly grasp the key ideas, benefits/disadvantages. This is enough for writing a literature review.
For this project, we do not expect you to learn every paper in detail and be overly comprehensive about
the topic, but rather cover the key papers, classifications/parameters.
Some useful links for literature review writing are below for your reference:
• https://students.unimelb.edu.au/academic-skills/explore-our-resources/report-
writing/reviewing-the-literature
• https://library.unimelb.edu.au/recite

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