UCLA Engineering: UCLA Engineer Spring 2003

Hands-on Wireless Design Courses
Next Generation Development

by Marlys Amundson

A new program at UCLA allows engineering students interested in pursuing careers in wireless systems to gain hands-on design experience through a series of experimental lab courses intended to provide them with the necessary technical depth and breadth to succeed in this growing field.

UCLA was one of only five universities selected by Intel to receive equipment worth more than $200,000 to develop a wireless curriculum. The combination of leading theoretical research and high performance practical testbed technology found at UCLA is unusual in a university setting, and offers the students a unique educational environment.

Professors Michael Fitz (sitting), Mani Srivastava, and Rajit Gadh

"We are leveraging the significant interdisciplinary wireless research experience at UCLA to formulate a curriculum that will produce engineers trained in system aspects of wireless," notes electrical engineering professor Michael Fitz, who is leading the project. "We feel that broad systems training can only be accomplished through hands-on experimental courses where the students see the tradeoffs involved in real system design, and the interactions across layers of a wireless communication system."

Under the guidance of electrical engineering professor Bill Kaiser, and in collaboration with professor Greg Pottie, a team of undergraduate students developed the software and hardware platforms for a design course last summer. Their work was supported through an endowed fund established by Dr. Henry Samueli ('75, '76, '80).

Last fall, UCLA offered a senior electrical engineering system design course (EE190D) that provided hands-on design experience to students working on engineering teams. The technical focus of the course is on wireless networking and embedded computing, and the design focus is on distributed wireless sensors.

Professors Bill Kaiser, Mario Gerla, and Babak Daneshrad

"This is the first undergraduate wireless sensor design course taught at UCLA, and marks the beginning of many wireless technology courses that will be enabled by the grant from Intel," notes Kaiser. ";We plan to extend this to support our undergraduate embedded systems field, providing added design opportunities for undergraduates at UCLA."

Students in this class identified design projects that relied on the course principle topics of wireless networking, embedded computing, and distributed sensing. They employed a network of articulated robotic imagers and articulated antenna systems developed during the summer undergraduate research program - hardware that was designed, developed, and fabricated at UCLA during the summer. A library of software tools and software reference designs was also developed and accessible to the students. The embedded platform uses the Intel-provided notebook PCs and IEEE 802.11 wireless interfaces. Having articulated components allows the students to develop systems for detecting and tracking objects through camera movement, or to exploit directional antenna characteristics to provide energy optimized wireless links.

"The students are given a critical educational experience, and become familiar with network self-organization, wireless network routing, wireless medium access protocols, and also wireless signal propagation and antenna properties in a real system. They also gain an introduction to middleware for communication between node applications and an understanding of the fundamentals of sensors, data acquisition, and sensor signal and image processing," explains Kaiser. The students work in groups with deliverables between teams, providing them with exposure to the real-world challenges of project management.

Among the projects undertaken in the class was a system that enables wireless nodes to employ their articulated antennas and their measurements of wireless channel characteristics to discover and locate their peer wireless nodes. Another group developed an object tracking and detection system that leveraged the hardware and software libraries created by students during the previous summer. Other students engaged in development of sensor and actuator systems and produced systems that will be used in future offerings.

"Future classes will build on the systems designed and implemented in this class," notes Kaiser, "providing students with a constantly evolving set of building blocks for developing new wireless components that can be tested for real-world performance."

One driving theme in the research conducted at UCLA is the marriage of theoretical and implementation aspects of wireless data communications. By nature, the work is multidisciplinary, with the end goal of designing hardware-friendly systems as well as system-friendly elements, which offer a rich set of alterable parameters.

The curriculum development project brings together wireless researchers at UCLA who are committed to enabling realistic research projects for senior undergraduate and graduate students. Computer science professors Deborah Estrin and Mario Gerla, electrical engineering professors Babak Daneshrad and Mani Srivastava, and mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Rajit Gadh are leading the development of a multidisciplinary, hands-on wireless curriculum.

"With the funding assistance from Intel, we will be able to provide practical exposure in a broader sense for what the students will be doing in their careers," says Fitz. "The three layers - physical, network, and applications - are often taught as separate disciplines when they are, in fact, closely interwoven. Wireless is a multidisciplinary field that spans many areas of expertise."

While UCLA has done an excellent job of training experts in the three disciplines in the past, they want to expand the curriculum to train students across a broad spectrum. Graduate students who work on wireless research projects receive a valuable education in very detailed research areas and at a broad systems level. Seeing how this project experience rounds out the educational experience, the team hopes to provide this opportunity to a wider range of students by adding laboratory project courses across the curriculum.

"Even though today wireless is a vertical technology," notes Fitz, "the most interesting and challenging problems in the next few years will be those related to wireless systems. We believe that an interdisciplinary, closely-knit engineering program such as ours is well suited for the wireless student of tomorrow."

For additional information on research in Computer Science, please visit http://www.cs.ucla.edu, and http://www.ee.ucla.edu/ for additional information on research in Electrical Engineering at UCLA.