Units:

12

Description:

This project-oriented course is the culmination of the MS ECE Wireless Systems Concentration. It provides third-semester students with a design experience that brings together concepts from the Wireless Systems core to solve a real-world problem.

The class organizes the students as a design team to build an outdoor system for distributed sensing of physical quantities, wireless connectivity to a data repository, and analysis and presentation of the data. The specific problem domains (e.g., pavement-mounted traffic sensors, sensors for overland water flow, soil moisture, or stream height) are selected to present specific challenges in wireless connectivity, low-power operation, distributed synchronization, federation of dissimilar sensor types, real-time computation, and information presentation. The instructors and project sponsors (customers) will guide the students in developing an understanding of the problem domain (environment and requirements) and selecting suitable technologies for addressing the challenges specific to it, creating and documenting a system architecture with verifiable interfaces, decomposing the architecture into sub-problems that sub-groups of students can address, integrating the results into a single system, and verifying system performance against the documented requirements. Consistent with the Wireless Systems concentration methodologies, student work will be organized around fixed-length sprints followed by an evaluation of progress with the customer and instructors.


Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to: generate systems specifications from a perceived need; partition functionality between hardware and software; produce interface specifications for a system composed of wirelessly-connected subsystems; use power and RF modeling tools; fabricate, integrate, and debug a hardware/software system; and evaluate the system in the context of an end user application.

Prerequisites: (18-743 or 18-747 or 18-859) and (18-637 or 18-741 or 18-750 or 18-748) and (18-741 or 18-744)

Last Modified: 2019-04-11 11:18AM

Semesters offered:

• Fall 2019