94.536: Mobile Computing Systems (Fall 2002)

Latebreaking News

In the Fall 2002 term, Thomas Kunz taught a graduate course on Mobile Computing as Congese course at IBM Toronto. As more information becomes available, it will be posted on this page. To find out more about the format of documents made available on this course webpage, read the comments on this page. There are interesting stories on Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) in the Ottawa Citizen Tech Weekly section on December 12, 2002 (at the bottom of the page). Some interesting websites are


For those of you who are interested, here is a little fairy-tale story about how signal processing works in the GSM system (explaining, among other things, what processing is needed why). While the discussion is specific to GSM, the general ideas are quite general and applicable to many wireless communication systems.

GSMWorld is a website with a lot of data on wireless data, some of it in the form of powerpoint presentations. These presentations are almost always concentrating on the business aspects and future predictions (which are always very promising): Mobile Data, GPRS, more GPRS, and WAP. This website also contains introductions to GPRS and WAP.

As usual in such a course, no single textbook covers all the topics we will touch on. However, a fairly complete coverage of the course is Mobile Communications, by Jochen Schiller, Addison-Wesley 2000, ISBN 0-201-39836-2.

Here is a short sequence of PPT transparencies from Nitin Vaidya on how to read, write, and present papers... (postscript or HTML document)

Plagiarism is unfortunately a not too infrequent problem in academia. I expect all submissions to clearly identify what sources/references have been used for what part of your submission. If you are unsure as to what constitutes plagiarism, please check this website.


Course material:

Course notes (PDF version has 2 slides per page, depending on the printer/viewer/computer, not all pages may be rendered but the vast majority will, the HTML version looks slightly better with Internet Explorer than with Netscape):

Thomas Kunz