General

Instructor:	Chen-Nee Chuah
	3125 Kemper Hall (EUII)
Lectures:	Tue/Thu 3:00 - 4:30pm, 233 Wellman
Lab Discussion:	Fri 11:00am-noon, 2112 Kemper Hall
Office Hours:	Tue 4:30-5:30pm, Fri noon-1:00 pm
Class Mailing List:	wireless-w06@ucdavis.edu
TA:	Yali Liu (yliu at ucdavis.edu)
TA office hour:	Friday 12:30-1:30pm, 2112 Kemper

Prerequisite

• EEC173A/ECS152A (or EEC189Q offered in F03, F04),
  or taken concurrently with approval of the instructor

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 Winter 2006, we will focus on wireless/mobile networking and applications. 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.

Students are encouraged to explore different topics for course projects. This quarter, the suggested design theme is Opportunistic Networking, where an end device exploits intermittent wireless connectivity with peers and infrastructure-based networks to perform different networking tasks. For example, such opportunistic communications can be leveraged to transport delay-insensitive data from a source node to destination node that is otherwise disconnected by hopping through a set of intermediate mobile nodes. Temporary ad hoc connectivity can also be exploited to support opportunistic peer-to-peer applications, e.g., sharing news headlines with classmates riding on the same bus.

The students are welcome to refer to example projects from Spring'05, where the main theme is to design and develop location-enhanced, mobile computing applications. Students leveraged Intel Place Lab framework to program hardware clients like notebooks and pocket PCs to estimate location information by listening for radio beacons such as 802.11 access points that already exist in large numbers around us in the environment. With this new capability to estimate users' location, students have designed 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. See Spring'05 class webpage and example student projects 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.

Textbook

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

Other References

• Notes and handouts

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

• 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 UC Davis Computer Engineering Educational Labs (CEEL project) funded by Intel Higher Education Equipment Grant, as well as the UC Davis Teaching Resource Center's Undergraduate Instructional Improvement Program (UIIP) grant, which make it possible to purchase wireless equipments (laptops, wireless APs, PDAs, and GPS receivers) used by the students in their design projects.

We also thank Dr. James Scott and Richard Gass from Intel Cambridge, UK, for lending us the imotes over the course period for tracking bluetooth connectivity.