CS 695 - 003
Wireless and Mobile Computing
Fall 2017

This schedule is tentative and subject to change during the semester. Please check this page regularly to know about various course deadlines. Presentation slides, assignments etc. are available through Blackboard.

Date Topic Due Reading
09/01 Course introduction
Course objectives, topics, structure and discussion on course project 		- -
09/08 Wireless networks: MAC design
CSMA/CA, dynamic channel bonding, 802.11n/ac MAC, energy efficiency 		- [1] Chapters 2, 3
[2] Chapters 1, 2
09/15 Wireless networks: PHY design - I
Modulation and coding, OFDM, link rate adaptation, cross-layer protocol 		Review [3] [4], [5]
09/22 Wireless networks: PHY design - II
Multi-antenna systems, MIMO, spatial multiplexing, MIMO rate adaptation, beamforming, MU-MIMO 		Review [6] [7],
[8] Chapter 4
09/29 Multi-gigabit wireless: millimeter wave networking - I
60 GHz wireless networks, directionality and beamforming, IEEE 802.11ad MAC and PHY 		Project
Proposal		 -
10/06 Multi-gigabit wireless: millimeter wave networking - II
60 GHz wireless beamforming codebook design, beam steering and width adaptation 		Review [9] -
10/13 Visible light communication
Visible light channel and propagation, LED transmitter design, pulse and color modulations, dimming and flickering, mobile imaging receivers, IEEE 802.15.7 PHY 		Programming
assignment - 1		 -
10/20 Midterm
 - -
10/27 Mobile and wearable sensing
Overview of inertial sensors, magnetometer, orientation and heading detection on smartphones, activity recognition and pedometer, gesture recognition on smartwatch 		- -
11/03 Indoor localization
WiFi indoor localization, war-driving, dead reckoning using inertial sensors, crowdsourcing for localization, visible light positioning 		Review [10] -
11/10 Contact-free RF sensing
Radio frequency sensing using RSS and CSI, activity monitoring, person identification, gait analysis and vital sign monitoring through RF		 - -
11/17 Low power networking
RFID and backscatter communication, Bluetooth and 802.15.4 PHY/MAC, IoT protocol stack with overview of 6LowPAN and other protocols 		Programming assignment - 2 -
11/24 No class - thanksgiving break
 - -
12/01 Student presentations - I
 Review [11], [12] -
12/08 Students presentations - II
 - -
12/15 Project demos
 - -

Reading list:
[1] 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, Book by Matthew Gast (available online through GMU library)

[2] IEEE 802.11 Tutorial, Mustafa Ergen, available at http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee228a/fa03/228A03/802.11%20wlan/802.11_tutorial.pdf

[3] Xu, Kaixin, Mario Gerla, and Sang Bae. "Effectiveness of RTS/CTS handshake in IEEE 802.11 based ad hoc networks." Ad hoc networks 1.1 (2003): 107-123. [Link]

[4] S. Biaz and S. Wu, "Rate adaptation algorithms for IEEE 802.11 networks: A survey and comparison," 2008 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications, Marrakech, 2008, pp. 130-136. [Link]

[5] Daniel Aguayo, John Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, Glenn Judd, and Robert Morris. 2004. Link-level measurements from an 802.11b mesh network. In Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications (SIGCOMM '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 121-132. [Link]

[6] Wong, Starsky HY, Hao Yang, Songwu Lu, and Vaduvur Bharghavan. "Robust rate adaptation for 802.11 wireless networks." In Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, pp. 146-157. ACM, 2006. [Link]

[7] Vivek Shrivastava, Shravan Rayanchu, Jongwoon Yoonj, and Suman Banerjee. "802.11n under the microscope." In Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement (IMC '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 105-110. [Link]

[8] 802.11ac: A Survival Guide, book by Matthew Gast, O'Reilly Media.(available online through GMU library)

[9] Y. Zeng, P. H. Pathak and P. Mohapatra, "A first look at 802.11ac in action: Energy efficiency and interference characterization," 2014 IFIP Networking Conference, Trondheim, 2014, pp. 1-9. [Link]

[10] Roy, Nirupam, He Wang, and Romit Roy Choudhury. "I am a smartphone and i can tell my user's walking direction" Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services (MobiSys). ACM, 2014. [Link]

[11] Jaime Lien, Nicholas Gillian, M. Emre Karagozler, Patrick Amihood, Carsten Schwesig, Erik Olson, Hakim Raja, and Ivan Poupyrev. "Soli: ubiquitous gesture sensing with millimeter wave radar", ACM Trans. Graph. 35, 4, Article 142 (July 2016), 19 pages. [Link]

[12] Krishna Chintalapudi, Anand Padmanabha Iyer, and Venkata N. Padmanabhan. 2010. Indoor localization without the pain. In Proceedings of the sixteenth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking (MobiCom '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 173-184. [Link]


A list of topics that will be covered in the course is provided below. Please note that this is a tentative list and is subject to change (including the order of topics) based on our progress. Instructor will provide required and optional reading material (lecture notes and research papers) for each class. Detailed schedule and course material will be posted on the course website.

1. Wireless networking [3.5 weeks]
    Primer on wireless communications and networking
            A. Physical layer
                    - OFDM and 802.11 (WiFi) PHY
                    - Multi-antenna systems and MIMO
                    - Overview of 802.11n/ac PHY including beamforming
            B. MAC layer
                    - CSMA/CA and WiFi MAC overview
                    - Wide bandwidth channel access techniques (802.11n/ac)
                    - Energy efficiency and rate control

2. Mobile and wearable sensing [2.5 weeks]
            A. Overview of smartphone/wearable sensors
                    - Accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer etc.
                    - Smartphone orientation and heading detection
            B. Activity recognition and healthcare
                    - Identifying human activities and context through sensors
                    - Health monitoring and fitness tracking
            C. Wearables overview
                    - Wrist-worn wearables - gesture and remote interaction
                    - Sensor fusion in body-area networks

3. Multi-gigabit wireless networks [2.5 weeks]
    Next generation (5G) wireless technologies
    Upper Gigahertz and Terahertz wireless communications
            A. Millimeter wave networking
                    - Directionality and beamforming
                    - Mobility and signal blockage
                    - IEEE 802.11ad (60 GHz WLAN) MAC and PHY overview
            B. Visible light communication
                    - High-speed networking using LEDs
                    - IEEE 802.15.7 PHY and MAC overview
            C. Sensing through visible light
                    - Visible light indoor localization and positioning

4. Indoor localization and RF sensing [2 weeks]
            A. Smartphone localization
                    - WiFi fingerprinting - protocols and challenges
                    - Non-WiFi localization
            B. Device-free sensing with radio frequency
                    - Mining wireless PHY channel state information
                    - Device-free localization and indoor human tracking
                    - Activity and gesture recognition through RF

5. Low-power networking [2 weeks]
            A. Backscatter communication
                    - Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology overview
                    - Energy harvesting tags and applications
            B. Internet-of-Things (IoT)
                    - IoT protocol overview - CoAP and MQTT
                    - IPv6 networking in low-power PANs (6LoWPAN)

6. Future mobile networks [If time permits]
            A. Drone networking
                    - Multi-UAV networks, architectures and civilian applications
                    - Communication challenges and protocols for micro UAVs
            B. Connected and autonomous cars
                    - Wireless technologies for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications
                    - Automotive surrounding sensing with GHz and THz signals