ECE 697W Special Topics in Wireless Communications

University of Massachusetts

Welcome to the 697W Course Home Page! This serves as the syllabus for the course. The URL is: http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/vspgroup/burleson/courses/697W/

Instructor: Wayne Burleson, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, tel: 413-545-2382, email: burleson@ecs.umass.edu Office: KEB309C, Office Hours : Tues/Thurs 1-2pm

NEW! Course Meeting Time/Place: Marston 211, 11:15-12:30

NEW! Class email list

Course Description

Motivations: Wireless communications presents one of the most exciting and challenging areas in ECE today. The field is characterized by the need to solve multidisciplinary problems spanning communications theory, signal processing, networks, distributed systems, VLSI, RF and microwave hardware and antenna design. Research and industrial work in wireless communications has created a high demand for students who have background in at least two of these areas. The UMASS Wireless Communications Center has been recently formed to address research and educational needs in this exciting area. Details on the Wireless Communications Center can be viewed at www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/wireless-center/

Who Should Take This Course? Graduate students with an interest in Wireless Communications in all of its facets. There are no formal pre-reqs although an undergraduate degree in ECE with basic communications theory and electronics courses is assumed. Students should be ready to deal with the challenges of multidisciplinary study, with significant motivation for self-study. Students should also bring ideas for projects related to their own research, skills and interests. The course size will be kept below 15 to allow a seminar format with substantial interaction.

Course Format: This multidisciplinary course will provide background in a variety of areas of wireless communications as well as exploring advanced topics in selected areas according to the interests of the class. The course will start with lectures by members of the ECE department Wireless Communications Center (Profs. Burleson, Ganz, Goeckel, Gong, Krishna, Jackson, Pozar) as well as guests. Students will be responsible for providing selected transcriptions of these lectures and the corresponding discussions which will be combined into a common course web site. Multidisciplinary team projects form the second part of the course and will explore topics related to ongoing research in the Wireless Communications Center. Student groups will make presentations of their work as well as contributing final reports and presentation materials to the course web-site.

Schedule (this WILL emerge as the course progresses )
Date Lecture/Lecturer  Content/Handouts/Links Transcription 
Jan 27 Introduction (Burleson)  Questionnaire   Katz course  Terminology Burleson
Feb 1 History and Fundamentals of Wireless (Burleson)  History   Fundamentals Discussion problems  none 
Feb 3 VLSI LZ Compression for WLAN (Burleson)  Jung and Burleson, Wireless Networks, 4, (1998) 27-39  Sriram 
Feb 8 more VLSI LZ Compression for WLAN, regular arrays, low-power design (Burleson)  low-power slides PDF Discussion problems  Navin 
Feb 10 MPEG4  JVSP paper, Sig Proc mag paper MPEG site   UMass DVD project  Veesu 
Feb 15  Wireless MPEG4 (Burleson)  JVSP paper, Sig Proc mag paper    Kamalaker 
Feb 17  Wireless Network  Ganz CD  Ganz web-site,   Jimmy  
Feb 22  Wireless Network  Ganz CD  Feedback on Ganz lectures including 5 review questions   Hong  
Feb 24  Krishna   Yu Tao   (presentation)  
Feb 29  Krishna PROJECT PROPOSAL1 DUE via Proposal1 email form   
Mar 2  Gong  no transcription
Mar 7  Gong  no transcription 
Mar 9 Goeckel  Randall 
Mar 21  Goeckel    Krishnanand  
Mar 23  Franks  PROJECT PROPOSAL2 DUE via Proposal2 email form    Pinar  
Mar 28  Jackson   Vidhya  
Mar 30  Jackson's guest, John LaChapelle  
April 4  no meeting
April 6  no meeting
April 11  no meeting    
April 13  no meeting
April 18  no meeting PROJECT STATUS1 DUE via Status email form 
April 20  Monday sched, no meeting
April 25  student presentations (Veesu, Randy)
April 27  student presentations (Naveen, Raigir) PROJECT STATUS REPORT 2 DUE via Status2 email form 
May 2  student presentations (Pinar, Krishnan)
May 4  student presentations (Sriram, Vidhya)
May 9  student presentations (Yu, Jimmy, Hong)
May 11 Class Wrap-up, SRTIs, refreshments! 
May 12  no meeting FINAL VERSIONS OF TRANSCRIPTIONS AND PROJECTS DUE , Final Project Report Format  project reports can be found from links above

Grading:

1) Transcriptions are a technique used in special topics grad courses at MIT. They fulfill two purposes: 1) they engage students in the lectures since there are no problem sets or exams, and 2) they document the course since there is no textbook or pre-prepared class note packet. Each student is responsible for transcribing 1 or 2 lectures. The transcription is a summary and critique of the lecture and class discussion with pointers to the class notes, project reports, references, (should be Web-based). The transcriptions are combined at the end of the course to provide a complete Web-based record of the course for the students, faculty and future offerings of the course. Refer to the last column in the table above for examples of transcriptions. Transcription drafts should be submitted via email within 2 weeks after the corresponding lectures. Final versions of the transcriptions are due on May 12.

2) Graduate seminar require regular attendance and participation of ALL students in order to be successful. Participation will be evaluated qualitatively by the Burleson and the guest lecturers.

3) Projects are critical to this course and need to be planned carefully with one or two WCC faculty members for each project and clearly defined deliverables. Students should provide input on the their interests but WCC members have have several project idea already well-prepared.

Project Ideas Project grading will consist of 4 email progress reports, a presentation and a final report. I know this sounds like a lot but I think it is necessary to keep you on track.

Other information

burleson@ecs.umass.edu (Last Update: 4/12/00)