Southern Methodist University: EE 8391 - Embedded Wireless Protocol Design Lab

The ​Embedded Wireless Protocol Design Lab is an Electrical Engineering graduate course offered this Spring (2010) at ​Southern Methodist University that focuses on WARP development at the MAC and PHY layers. The course is taught by ​Professor Joe Camp who received his Ph.D. from Rice University in the Spring of 2009. In lab assignments, students implement various types of wireless protocols such as different types of media access layers, rate adaptation and routing algorithms, and MIMO schemes. Each student is part of a four/five person team with a semester-long research agenda that is proposed by the students. The five teams are exploring topics ranging from channel estimation and sub-carrier allocation to next-generation rate selection and multi-band adaptation for vehicular networks. The course is the first full semester course on embedded protocols for WARP and incorporates inter-disciplinary topics including embedded programming, interrupt-driven operation, and FPGA-based design with wireless networking.

The course is a critical component in the training of graduate students for design, implementation, and field deployment on the Dallas-ARea Testbed for Context-Aware, Cognitive Research (DART-CARs), an effort led by Professor Joe Camp and Professor Dinesh Rajan. Recently awarded by NSF, the DART-CARs infrastructure enables the study of wireless performance in a broad class of mobile and static environments from indoor labs to outdoor high-way speeds within a single testbed. The central theme of the work is leveraging contextual and cognitive data from the increasing ability of wireless devices to sense their surroundings to improve wireless system performance.

Pictured (left to right): Veeral Kurani, Yunchul (Bryan) Jeon, Aditya Mane, Professor Joe Camp, Jialin He, and Tiaotiao Wang. Bryan Jeon and Tiaotiao Wang are both Ph.D. students under Professor Camp. Jialin is a Ph.D. student under Professor Dinesh Rajan.