Syllabus
Course Description
This course provides an overview of wireless technologies from a system perspective, specifically focusing on the physical layer (Layer 1) and the medium access control layer (L2). The topics in Layer 1 include analog/digital signals, modulation/demodulation, encode/decode and etc. By focusing on Wi-Fi protocol, the course covers various important problems regarding L2. Particularly, the course will carefully examine the security issues related to Wi-Fi. In addition, other popular wireless technologies will also be introduced at a high level, e.g., Bluetooth, cellular networks and etc.
Prerequisite Topics
There is no specific course prerequisite requirement for this course. However, it is encouraged that students who take this course have strong independent programming skill.
Instructor
Moench F212
877-8345 (Office)
Textbook
No textbook is required. The course will heavily leverage existing online materials.
Laboratories
Labs are the core component of this course. The course adopts a “learning by doing” approach so that a significant portion of learning will happen during the labs. For each week, there will be about two class periods dedicated as lab hours (depending on the subject). Students will implement a certain functionality from scratch. Therefore, beyond learning wireless technologies, students will also learn many development tools and so on.
Project
At Week 6, students will need to propose and finish a final project. The topic can be anything related to wireless networking and mobile computing. As the deliverables, students should give an in-class presentation plus live demo (if applicable). The final submission should include complete source code with proper documents.
Grading
| Item | Weight |
|---|---|
| Labs (6 - 7) | 70% |
| Final Project | 30% |
Generally, 90-100% is an A, 80-89% is a B, etc.
The course will tentatively adopt a self-grading approach. For each lab, the grade will consist of two parts: 1) student self-grading (70%) and 2) instructor grading (30%). For the self-grading part, students will evaluate their own works by following certain metrics, e.g., completion, novelty and so on.