A hands-on course on wireless and mobile systems design

Abstract

While we cannot make every student an expert on all topics from the wireless channel to mobile application design, we can provide students with a critical understanding of the context for their work in different aspects of wireless systems. We describe the design and development of a hands-on course on wireless and mobile systems design offered at Virginia Tech, integrating topics in wireless networking and mobile computing. Students conduct laboratory experiments and design projects that cover a broad spectrum of issues (from cochannel interference and medium access to routing and addressing, middleware support and mobile application design) that directly affect mobile computing. We describe the structure of the course, outline lecture topics and hands-on exercises, and summarize student feedback to the first offering of the course.