General

Instructor:	Chen-Nee Chuah
	3125 Kemper Hall (EUII)
Lectures:	Tue/Thu 12:10 - 1:30pm, 1130 Bainer
Lab Discussion:	Wed 9:00-9:50 am, 2112 Kemper Hall
Office Hours:	Tue 11:00am - noon, Fri 12:30-1:30 pm
Class Mailinglist:	wireless-s05@ucdavis.edu

Prerequisite

• EEC173A/ECS152A (or EEC189Q offered in F03, F04)

Overview

This course consists of hands-on design capstone projects in communication networks for undergraduates in computer engineering and computer science majors. The goal of the course is to provide undergraduate students with experience in cutting-edge technology research. The advanced topics discuss may vary from year to year, and examples include: wireless networks, multimedia networking, network design and management, traffic analysis and modeling, network simulations and performance analysis.

For Spring 2005, we will emphasize on techniques for designing and analyzing wireless networks/mobile computing, from the application to the link layers. We will cover basic principles of wireless communications and the latest technologies (e.g., bluetooth, wifi, wimax, sensor network). Students will be required to work on a quarter-long design project that explores how these wireless technologies can be used to design societal-scale applications and builds a proof-of-concept prototypes. The lab assignments and class projects will provide students with hands-on experience in software development and experimentations.

One example project will be designing and developing location-enhanced, mobile computing applications. We will leverage Intel Place Lab framework, where the students can program hardware clients like notebooks, pocket PCs, or cell phones to locate themselves by listening for radio beacons such as 802.11 access points, GSM cell phone towers, and fixed Bluetooth devices that already exist in large numbers around us in the environment. With this new capability to estimate users' location, students will be asked to design location-aware applications, e.g., spatial-aware (in addition to temporal-aware) to-do list that sends an alert message when a user is approaching a particular geographic location, or locating victims based on signals from their mobile device during disaster response.

This course is cross-listed with ECS152C. Please refer to the extended course description for more details.

Goals

This undergraduate course intends to illustrate the design, management, and operational principles of telecommunication networks. Students have weekly lab assignments to reinforce the concepts and provide hands-on experience. They will also be presented with problems that require them to explore various approaches to the problem, choose between alternatives, and justify their solutions based on performance and cost/complexity considerations.

By the end of the quarter, the students will be able to use concepts learned in class to develop systematic approach to address open design problems, including scalability, complexity, and robustness issues of large-scale networking systems, properties and configurations of underlying hardware components, heterogeneous channel characteristics, and emerging applications.

In addition, we also emphasize the training of students in analytic/writing and oral communication skills. Students are required to submit written projects proposals and reports. They will be asked to make an oral presentation of their projects at the end of the quarter.

Grading

Project:Students work in small groups on lab projects.

References

• Instructor's own notes/handouts

• William Stallings, Wireless Communicatoins & Networks, 2nd Edition, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005 (ISBN: 0-13-191835-4).

• Jochen Schiller, Mobile Communications, 2nd edition, Pearson Education Limited, 2003 (ISBN 0-321-12381-6).

• C. Siva Ram Murthy and B. S. Manoj, Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: Architecture and Protocols, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004 (ISBN: 0-13-147023-X).

• Theodore S. Rappaport, Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice, 2nd Edition, 2002 (ISBN: 0-13-042232-0).

Acknowledgement

This class benefits from the Undergraduate Instructional Improvement Program (UIIP) grant through the Teaching Resources Center, which makes it possible to purchase PDAs and GPS receivers used by the students in their class projects. We are also grateful to Prof. Mohapatra (Computer Science, UC Davis) for loaning us several laptops for the quarter.