Tongji: Mobile Computing Systems (Summer 2007)

Latebreaking News

A good source of information (mostly related to the wireless industry and wireless standards) is FierceBroadbandWireless.com

In the Summer of 2007, Thomas Kunz will be teaching a modified version of his graduate course on Mobile Computing (course description can be found here) at Tongji University, Shanghai, China. 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.

Some random links with information connected to the course:

A funny list of irreverent cellular acronyms
We touch on security/encryption quite a bit in this course, if you want to learn the basic terminology, check out Bob and Alice (in particular this external link, which has a humorous description/introduction to the topic).
Another topic we talk about in class are standards. Here is a funny story about the consequences of standards.
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.

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.
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).

Reading papers, preparing presentations: the course will require you to (among other things) read papers, prepare a presentation, and engage in a course project, training your research skills. To prepare for these tasks, you should consult a number of online references on how to go about this (preparing a GOOD presentation or project report takes substantial effort):

A short sequence of PPT transparencies from Nitin Vaidya on how to read, write, and present papers (postscript or HTML document).
IEEE Computer, September 2005, had an interesting article on Presentation Skills.
Another useful reference is the website Advice on Research and Writing and the Graduate Study in the Computer and Mathematical Sciences: A Survival Manual website.
On the other hand, avoid the pitfalls identified in How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia.
Professor Bertossi posted some projects and paper presentation guidlines for his graduate course.
A (tongue-in-cheek) dictionary of "useful" research phrases.
A lengthy but very interesting talk by Richard Hamming on what it takes to be a great researcher.
An interesting editorial on what higher education should be about.

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 handout:

As PDF file or as HTML document (not yet)
Notes on the use of NS2, a network simulator we will use widely in this course (requires userid/password)
Lab Assignments
Sample Final Exams: note that these are based on slightly longer versions of the course I was teaching in our graduate program, so they cover some topics that are not discussed in this course. I only post them to give you an indication for the type of questions I usually like to ask in an exam. The sample solutions likewise give you an impression of the type of answers I expect.

Actual Final Exam and Sample Solution

Course material (password-protected):

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). The set of slides includes some I took from Prof. Schiller's slides for his textbook, a few slides are from the Tutorial on Wireless Sensor Networks by Deborah Estrin, Akbar Sayeed, and Mani Srivastava, and some slides are prepared by Nitin Vaidya for his tutorials on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Routing, MAC and Transport Issues and TCP for Wireless and Mobile Hosts:

Introduction, as HTML document or PDF file
Wireless Cellular Systems, as HTML document or PDF file
Wireless LANs, as HTML document or PDF file
Mobile IP, as HTML document or PDF file
TCP over Wireless Links, as HTML document or PDF file
Ad Hoc Networks, Sensor Networks, as HTML document or PDF file

More information on OLSR, as HTML document or PDF file

Service Discovery, as HTML document or PDF file
System Support for Mobile Applications, as HTML document or PDF file
Appendix, as HTML document or PDF file

Thomas Kunz