Review by:
Adway Girish, 2022 (B.Tech.)
Course Offered In :
Spring 2022
Instructors :
Prof. Prof. Prasanna Chaporkar
Prerequisites :
A strong understanding of digital communication (EE 341) and probability (EE 325) is essential to make the most of this course, and are strict prerequisites; most of your time will be spent trying to make sense of the preliminaries otherwise. Sophomores cannot take this course.
Difficulty :
6/10. The content itself is not difficult, and can be completely understood by simply following lectures. Some problem solving practice is required to understand how to apply the material.
Course Content :
The aim is to study how modern mobile and wireless communication systems work. The course begins by modelling the wireless channel as a fading channel, on which conventional Gaussian channel communication schemes simply do not work. The concept of diversity (space, time, and antenna) is introduced to enable communication over fading channels, and much of the course revolves around computing the error performance under maximum likelihood decoding of various diversity setups. After this, the focus shifts to more practical questions: frequency allocation and reuse in frequency division multiplexed time division multiple access (FDM-TDMA) systems such as GSM; and call blocking, dropping and handover analysis using Markov queueing models.
Feedback on Lectures :
The instructor likes explaining topics interactively and provides loads of examples that make it easy to follow what is taught. He is more than willing to answer doubts or repeat topics if asked to.
Feedback on Evaluations :
We were given a few tutorial questions for each topic, which were helpful. There were no assignments and the exam questions were similar to the tutorial problems.
Study Material and References :
Notes from the lectures were available. In addition, the following references helped:
- Tse, D., & Viswanath, P. (2013). Fundamentals of wireless communication. Cambridge UP: Cambridge. (a standard reference for wireless communication; the initial chapters provide an excellent introduction to the topic)
- Kumar, A., Manjunath, D., & Kuri, J. (2009). Wireless Networking. New York: Elsevier. (wonderful treatment of the more practical material covered in the latter half of the course)
Follow-up Courses :
There are no follow-up courses (1. at the time of writing this review, 2. to the best of my knowledge) in the sense of having EE 764 as a prerequisite. Those who are interested in exploring wireless communication further should consider (in decreasing order of relevance to EE 764), courses that provide a well-rounded perspective: EE 799 (Advanced Antennas), EE 706 (Communication Networks), EE 777 (Network Security), EE 605 (Error Correcting Codes), and EE 708 (Information Theory and Coding). Those interested in the Markov models used in analysing call drops and handovers can treat themselves to an entire course on the same in EE 621 (Markov Chains and Queueing Systems).
Final Takeaways :
This course bridges the gap between undergraduate communication courses and the communication systems that are in use around the world. It also introduces the language and sets up the preliminaries of wireless communication, which is needed for anyone looking to work in this area.
Grading Statistics:
