Wireless Networks is one of the fastest growing technologies in the past two decades. Today we are surrounded by devices which utilize wireless radio transceivers for communications/networking with each other, such as mobile phones (3G/3.5G/4G cellular networks), laptops (WiFi/Bluetooth), FM/AM radios, satellite TV, cordless phones, etc, and they play a crucial role in our daily life: imagine how disastrous a day would be when you do not have your cell phone/laptop/TV.
Many students with a computer science background always consider the wireless system to be a mysterious blackbox or pipe: it will swallow the input bits from one end and spit out the bits at the other end of the wireless link with a fixed error probability. This is, of course, nowhere close to the reality. In this course, we will demystify the world of wireless networks for you. You will learn from the lowest layer (in the sense of OSI’s 7 layer architecture), talking about how the information bits are manipulated into signals to be transmitted in the air, or how the signal propagates between the transmitter and the receiver, to the middle layers, about how multiple devices can share the same transmission medium in an orderly fashion, or how the information are routed in a large-scale wireless network, and to the highest layer, about how to estimate if the performance of a wireless network is sufficient to support an application you have in mind.
In the course, we will also have several experimental projects for the students to learn about the wireless networks from their first-hand experience. The projects will involve developing and implementing protocols for a radio transceiver.