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):

 

Finally, here are links to three open access books on wireless networks/wireless sensor networks that also may be of interest to you:

·         Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Applications

·         Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Protocol Design

·         Wireless Sensor Networks


Course handout and other information, including assignments:

 

·         Course handout (posted on Brightspace)

 

·         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:

·         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.

·         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).

·         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.

·         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.

·         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.

·         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.

·         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.

·         Omnet++ User Guide, explaining the IDE

·         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).

·         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

·         Wireless LANs

·         Mobile IP

·         TCP over Wireless Links

·         Ad Hoc Networks

·         Sensor Networks (optional, not covered in lectures)


Thomas Kunz