Lehrinhalte
• 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.
Mathematics of Communication Networks: The goal of this lecture is to introduce some of the mathematical tools which is used to analyze different aspects of communication networks. By communication networks, we mean a set of nodes which have to satisfy certain communication goals subject to some constraint, or simply a set of nodes with purposeful efficient communication. Firstly we discuss general models for the topology of networks. Particularly stochastic and deterministic models for spatial networks are discussed. The next part concerns with the communication part, namely the flow of data through the network. Beside basic information theory, we study the mathematical models for delay, traffic, multi access and routing in networks. Then we study the purpose of communication through the questions of decision making, estimation and detection in networks. Finally we focus on the issue of efficiency in the network. Optimization and game theory is discussed in relation with communication networks.
More information is available on the module web page (see Recommended Reading, Lecture Notes).
