Content
• Compulsory content:
Seminar network technologies: The seminar discusses huge variety of topics of students' choice in the area of wireless mobile communication. Every semester, a more specific scope of the seminar is selected (e.g., traffic management in the LTE networks, green wireless networking, etc.). Within this technical scope, students are expected to provide their own proposals of interesting problems they would like to work on in the seminar. Following a discussion, detailed seminar topics are agreed and assigned individually to the students to work on during the semester. The main tasks students are expected to fulfill include: identification of the most important out of recent research works that are related to the seminar topic, classification of collected research articles according to a well-motivated taxonomy, identification of the most important open issues to be solved, and view on further research directions.
• Compulsory Elective content (6 ECTS credits must be obtained in this part, see Module Components):
Modern Wireless Networks: The goal of this lecture is twofold. First, to provide a solid overview of modern wireless communications systems. To this end, the scope of addressed topics is very broad, ranging from technologies suited for personal (Bluetooth) and local networks (IEEE 802.11) to the classical cellular networks, including the most important standards in the evolution path: GSM, GPRS, UMTS, LTE, and LTE-Advanced. Second and most importantly, the aspect of integration of the above mentioned systems will be discussed, with many practical details on how different technologies and solutions can co-exist together in order to improve the overall service efficiency. A special attention will be put on problems with adjusting the individual mechanisms/solutions to work in a co-operative framework.
Ad-hoc- and sensor networks: Sensor networks differ from "traditional" wireless networks in several aspects, most importantly in their resource constrained nature. The sensor nodes are typically severely restricted in terms of memory, processing capacity and energy budget leading to the need for careful design of the node system software and protocol stack. These novel system solutions, driven by the specific nature of the sensor networks as a platform, are the focus of our interest in this course. Individual lecture units include: Introduction, application areas and system requirements; System architecture (node-level, network-level, software support); Protocol stack (physical layer, link layer, medium access control and routing); Services (addressing, topology control, time synchronization and localization).
High-speed Network Technologies: This lecture will introduce the principles of high-speed communication, also called Gigabit communication. This course is dealing with the data transmission and link control, i.e., what is called Layer-2 technologies in the classical ISO/OSI layer model. We look into Ethernet, SONET/SDH, and (G)MPLS and see how these are applied in today's carrier networks. Traditionally the course has been giving a survey on the 'zoo' of alternative technologies, extracting patterns and underlying principles of frame synchronization, multiplexing, and logical link control. We continue this into the new area of Software-defined Networks with an introduction into OpenFlow and a small hands-on part setting up OpenFlow datapaths and controllers.
Content Delivery Techniques: This lecture aims at equipping the students with a good understanding of how content distribution is managed in the Internet by covering the steps of content delivery. More particularly, students will develop skills to model and design content delivery solutions for Internet as well as to optimize performance of these systems. We start with an overview of content delivery architectures in the core network, e.g., content delivery networks as the main technique in the current Internet and information-centric networks as an emerging and well-grounded technique for the Future Internet. Next, we move on to the delivery at the access network, e.g., cellular delivery or offloading to WiFi. Finally, we discuss how video content is delivered over the wireless medium, e.g., video adaptation based on the wireless channel quality. Based on this scope, the course provides techniques for content delivery spanning all layers of the protocol stack, e.g, routing to video rate adaptation. Moreover, the course’s goal is to familiarize students with the tools used in the related literature, e.g., NDN simulator, video streaming software, by the help of a course project. Course project consists of reading selected papers and replicating or improving the proposals of the papers. The project can be prepared by a group of two or three students or individually.
More information is available on the module web page (see Recommended Reading, Lecture Notes).
