Course Instructor: Dragoș Ștefan Niculescu.

The course has a dual purpose - to study in detail the ubiquitous WiFi technology, and to get an introduction to how to do research in computer science. The first half of the course is dedicated to discussing the 802.11 standards, and the principles behind them. This provides a foundation for the second part, which comprises of reading/discussing/critiquing high quality research papers that use WiFi. The students will get familiarity with how to read a paper, how a technical idea is proposed, how it is pitched against existing solutions, how a quantitative evaluation is performed, and how to generally evaluate an engineering solution that eventually gets used in practice. The lab is dedicated to the mechanics of producing research results: preparing and running wireless simulations, collecting data, plotting and interpreting graphs.

• 6 weeks: 802.11 standards and principles
• 8 weeks: 2-3 research articles per week
• Measurements, Congestion
• Handoff
• Uplink & Downlink optimizations
• Power and rate adaptation
• Channel usage
• WiFi architectures
• TCP over WiFi
• Multihop using WiFi