Laboratory Enhancement Of Digital And Wireless Communications Courses

Over the past decade, the field of wireless communications has come into its own and is posed to become a ubiquitous technology with the recent arrival of 3G cellular, wireless local area networks and wireless sensor networks. As such, today’s graduating electrical engineers need marketable skills which are typically not developed in undergraduate curricula. This paper describes an ongoing program at the University of Vermont (UVM) which addresses this need through the integration of both wireless communication system test methods and device characterization techniques into its curriculum. In its first year, this program, enabled by a NSF CCLI A&I award, developed infrastructure and adapted experiments from the University of South Florida into a senior-level laboratory course. Now in its second year, new experiments have been developed and have been integrated into a junior-level introductory communication systems course and two senior/graduate-level courses in digital and wireless communication systems. Herein, we discuss the new experiments, enabling infrastructure, and longitudinal assessment data.