Project: An efficient ASN.1 coding and decoding system.
(suggested by H. Paul Lin of Bell Communications Research)

ASN.1 is a presentation layer standard. The coders and decoders that
were implemented so far have been criticized to be very slow and contributed to
60-90% of the overall protocol processing time.  How to come up with an 
efficient implementation is an interesting project.  The implementation can
be improved by taking advantages of the special network environment (
i.e., the set of distributed applications running on the networks),
design a better coding and decoding rule, or  examine the largest
subset of the ANS.1 that can have fast efficient implementation. 

Project: Compare the three encoding rules, BER, NDR, and XDR.
(suggested by H. Paul Lin of Bell Communications Research)

BER is the coding rule used in ASN.1 and probably the most powerful one with
very inefficient implementation.
XDR (eXternal Data Representation) is SUN Microsystem's presentation layer 
solution and favors the Big Endien architecture.
NDR is OSF DCE/DME's presentation layer solution.  It would be nice to
examine and compare these three standards from their expressive power, 
code efficiency, the performance of the coders/decoders.

(Chow Note: Industries involved with network management software 
are very interested in how OSF DCE/DME can facilitate their design and 
implementation efforts).