SYSC 5306: Mobile
Computing Systems (Winter 2022)
Updates
·
None,
the course is over
In
the Winter 2022 term, Thomas Kunz was teaching a
graduate course on Mobile Computing (course description can be found here). As more
information becomes available, it will be posted on
this page.
·
Page
with some fun/humorous takes on wireless networks
·
Page
with news/updates related to wireless networks
·
Page
with information (hopefully) helpful for doing
successful research
As usual in a graduate course, no single textbook covers all the topics we will touch on. However, fairly complete coverages of the course content can be found in:
·
Mobile Communications,
2nd edition, by Jochen Schiller, Pearson Education
Limited 2003, ISBN 0-321-12381-6. You can download a PDF version of that textbook here.
·
Ad
Hoc Wireless Networks: Architectures and Protocols, by C. Siva Ram Murthy and
B.S. Manoj, Prentice Hall 2004, ISBN 0-13-147023-X (despite
the title, it also covers many cellular/WLAN topics briefly).
You may also want to look at the following books (in addition to the references provided in the Appendix section on the website):
- Handbook of Sensor Networks: Algorithms and Architectures, edited by Ivan Stoymenovic, John Wiley & Sons 2005, ISBN 0-471-68472-4.
- Wireless Sensor Networks, by Ian F. Akyildiz and Mehmet Can Vuran, John Wiley & Sons 2010, ISBN 978-0-470-03601-3.
Finally, here are links to three open access books on wireless networks/wireless
sensor networks that also may be of interest to you:
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Mobile
Ad Hoc Networks: Applications
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Mobile
Ad Hoc Networks: Protocol Design
Course
handout and other information, including assignments:
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Course
handout (posted on Brightspace)
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For
the course assignments, you will design and run networking experiments and
analyze the results. We will use Omnet++ and you need
to install it on a computer of your choice:
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If
you run Linux, you may want to install Omnet++ from
the sources, see info and files here. The
virtual machine setup described below comes with Omnet++
6.0 Preview 15 pre-installed, using the INET 4.3 project, which implements a fairly complete simulation framework for the Internet
protocol stack. If you install Omnet++ that way, you
can skip all the steps below.
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Alternatively,
you can use a virtual machine with all the software pre-installed, following
these steps:
·
Install
Oracle VM Virtualbox for your OS/platform. I tested
the setup with Virtualbox 6.1.30, which you can
download from https://www.oracle.com/virtualization/technologies/vm/downloads/virtualbox-downloads.html?source=:ad:pas:go:dg:a_nas:71700000079711820-58700006707759327-p60691657511:RC_WWMK200609P00103C0001:
for various platforms. Note that you may be able to use other virtualization
software, such as VMWare, but I tested the installation on VM Virtualbox.
·
Download
the OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) that I created for an Ubuntu desktop from here (large file of 8.9 GB or so, so it may
take a while to download).
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Once
you installed Virtualbox (or have another solution
such as VMWare), you can extract the virtual machine by double-clicking on the
OVA file. That will create a virtual machine called SYSC5306 in the VirtualBox Manager.
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Start
up the virtual machine. The virtual machine is configured
with a single user (user name sysc5306) with password sysc5306. At startup, it will automatically log on to that account and
launch the Omnet++ IDE. You can also find a link to
start the Omnet++ IDE in the application menu.
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The
virtual machine is configured with 8 MB of RAM and 2
CPUs. Depending on the resources of your computer, you may want to adjust this
under Settings in the VirtualBox Manager.
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The
account has root privileges, so you can easily install additional
software/tools, if you so desire. In addition, the virtual machine may, from time to time, prompt you to update your installed
software to the latest version. It should not matter for the course whether you
actually apply these updates or not.
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Learning
Omnet++: like all non-trivial network simulators, it
will require some effort to learn how to use that tool. Here are some helpful
links to get you started, some of these we will also go over in class.
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Omnet++
User Guide, explaining the IDE
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TicToc tutorial, introducing the basic Omnet++
concepts: https://doc.omnetpp.org/omnetpp4/tictoc-tutorial/index.html.
All the various source files are already available under TicToc
(towards the bottom of the names of the Project Explorer window in the IDE).
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Tutorial
on wireless/mobile scenarios: https://inet.omnetpp.org/docs/tutorials/wireless/doc/index.html.
The source files for that tutorial are available under the inet4.3 project:
inet4.3->tutorials->wireless.
Course Material (password-protected, updated throughout the term):
As the slides will be updated, I will post them here for download and review, as PDF files. The set of slides includes some I adapted from Prof. Schiller's slides for his textbook.
·
Introduction
·
Data
in Wireless Cellular Systems
·
Introduction
to Omnet++/Experimental Research using Simulators
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Wireless
LANs
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Mobile
IP
·
TCP
over Wireless Links
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Ad
Hoc Networks
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Sensor
Networks (optional, not covered in lectures)
Thomas Kunz