MSIT 413 Wireless Technologies
Course Description


 

CATALOG DESCRIPTION: The course gives an overview of the technical concepts behind mobile cellular and wireless personal communications services. The major driving factors in this area are advances in microelectronics,   digital communications, and signal processing, and advanced intelligent networking.  The course will explain the nature of these technological advances and how they can be used to support new services.  Topics include: interference and capacity, wireless channels and propagation characteristics, digital modulation, error control, diversity, multiple-access, and mobility management. Concepts will be related to current and emerging industry standards.

REQUIRED TEXTS:
T. S. Rappaport, "Wireless Communications", 2nd Ed., Prentice-Hall, 2002.
K. Pahlavan and P. Krishnamurthy, "Principles of Wireless Networks", Prentice-Hall, 2002.
    (out of print; handouts to be provided)

REFERENCE TEXT:
K. Pahlavan and A. H. Levesque, "Wireless Information Networks", 2nd Ed., Wiley, 2005.

COURSE DIRECTOR: M. Honig

COURSE GOALS: To teach the technical principles underlying modern digital wireless communications systems, namely, the cellular concept, the effect of radio propagation on digital communications systems, methods for improving reliability, and multiple access techniques.

PREREQUISITES BY COURSES: 411

PREREQUISITES BY TOPIC:

        ITEM 1: Familiarity with time and frequency-domain description of signals.

        ITEM 2: Familiarity with communications networks.

DETAILED COURSE TOPICS:

        Week 1. Overview of current and emerging wireless systems, including cellular and WLANs; cellular models and frequency reuse.
(READING: Rappaport, Chs.1 and 2; Pahlavan and Levesque (P&L), Chs. 1 and 2)

        Week 2. Narrowband cellular, interference and system capacity, sectorization, cell splitting, spectral efficiency, trunking and grade of service.
(READING: Rappaport, Ch. 3 excluding Sec. 3.4)

        Week 3.  Channel assignment methods; radio propagation: large- and small-scale effects, path loss, shadowing, Rayleigh fading, Multi-input/Multi-output (MIMO) channels
(READINGS: Pahlavan and Krishnamurthy (P&K), Section 5.6.2, Ch. 2.1-2.3.6 (handout); P&L, Secs. 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2)

        Week 4. Wideband signals and multipath; Digital modulation: power, bandwidth, and error probability, Shannon capacity
(READINGS: P&K, Chapter 2 (propagation), Section 2.4 up to 2.4.5, Rappaport, Ch. 6 (modulation), Secs. 6.4-6.6, 6.8 (through 6.8.3), 6.10.2,
                       P&L, Chapter 7 (modulation) excluding 7.2.8-7.2.9, 7.4.2-7.5.2)

        Week 5. Quadrature modulation, OFDM; Multiple access techniques: Frequency-, Time-, and Code-Division; Spread-Spectrum, Direct-Sequence and Frequency-Hopped CDMA
(READING: P&K, Section 3.7, Appendix 3A,  Sections 3.8-9, Chapter 4 to 4.2.5 (handout), Rappaport, Chapter 9, excluding Secs. 9.6, 9.7.2-3)

 
        Week 6.  OFDMA, Wireless data systems: Quality of Service; Random access, 802.11.
(READING: P&K, Section 4.3 (handout), Rappaport, Sec. 9.6)

        Week 7. Mobility management in voice cellular and data networks, handoff and outage; mobile IP
(READING: P&K,  Sections 6.1-2; Section 3.10 (excluding 3.10.1.2) (handout))

        Week 8. Midterm; Forms of diversity; error control
(READING: P&K, Section 3.12.1, 3.13, Appendix 3B up to 3B.5)

        Week 9. Radio resource allocation, scheduling; Project presentations.

        Week 10. Project presentations; Technologies on the horizon
 

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENTS:

Homework 1: Questions on classifications of wireless systems, problems on interference and capacity.

Homework 2: Problems on path loss, fading, digital modulation.

Homework 3: Problems on multiple access, wireless data.

Homework 4: Problems on mobility management, diversity.
 

GRADES:  The course grade is based on homeworks (25%), a midterm test (20%), participation (10%), and a project (45%), consisting of a written report and presentation. The projects are assigned to teams consisting of three to four students.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:  When a student completes this course, s/he should be able to:

       1. Classify many of the current and emerging (next generation) wireless information networks.

       2. Characterize the tradeoffs among frequency reuse, signal-to-interference ratio, capacity, and spectral efficiency. 

       3. Characterize small-scale variations in terms of Doppler shift, coherence time, and coherence bandwidth.

       4. Characterize different digital modulation techniques used for wireless communications.

       5. Identify commonly used forms of diversity.

       6. Characterize Frequency-, Time-, Code-, and Orthogonal-Frequency Division Multiple Access, and estimate the associated system capacity.

       7. Characterize basic features of the 802.11 multiple access protocol.

       8. Characterize mobility management and handoff techniques used in cellular and ad-hoc networks.