ECE284 F05

Course description

Imagine a world where you walk into a room which automatically adjusts its temperature to your liking, interfaces with the multitude of personal gadgets you carry around and constantly monitors the air for the presence of any hazardous materials. Such ubiquitous data access and sensor-based information gathering is truly about “networks of embedded systems”, rather then simply stand-alone devices. Networking and wireless communications, and their energy efficient operation, are the key ingredients that allow these exciting new systems to flourish, and further overtake general purpose computing as the technology drivers of the future.

This class will study wireless networked systems, from a systems design perspective and focusing on aspects related to energy efficiency. It is targeted towards students in electrical engineering and computer science with an interest in wireless embedded systems and networks.

Lectures: The problem of energy efficient wireless systems will be studied in detail. This will involve aspects of channel modeling and communication theory (an undergraduate-level knowledge of communication systems and signal processing is desirable) including theoretical analysis. Implications for scheduling, medium access control, adaptation and routing will be discussed next. The lectures will also study common protocols and standards, and general aspects of emerging sensor network systems. Telos

Projects: In addition to lectures, there is a substantial practical component to expose you to actual system design aspects. This includes hands-on experimental design on embedded wireless sensor devices (Telos motes running TinyOS). The project part of the course involves extensive coding (basic coding experience in a language such as C is expected).

Topics: This course is targeted towards students in computer science and electrical engineering with an interest in wireless embedded systems and sensor networks. It is a systems design course, and as such strongly interdisciplinary, dealing with issues ranging from communication technologies to networking and applications, and with a strong focus on energy efficiency issues. As such, it is impossible to describe the nature of this course as a typical ECE or CSE one. Roughly, you can identify three distinct subject matters, each with their own style.

Energy efficient communications system design

Embedded protocol design

Hardware project

Setup: Due to the continuous and fast developments in the field of wireless embedded networks, no established up-to-date textbook is available that covers all topics relevant to this course. Instead, the main material will be introduced in lectures, whereby the lecture slides are made available online. Overview and other scientific papers, published in relevant conferences, are assigned as additional required reading. There is a final exam and a set of take-home tests. In addition, a significant portion of the course is devoted to a set of design projects. Some of these will expose you to actual hardware by programming Telos sensor nodes, which run the TinyOS operating system.

Logistics

	Instructor:	Warlock Curt Schurgers Email: curts®ece.ucsd.edu Phone: (858) 534-4865
	Office hours:	TBD EBU1, room 4405
	Lectures:	TuTh 9:30 am - 10:50 am in CENTR 206
	Grading:	50% student feedback of your yodeling performance at Price Center; 30% eating competition; 30% gnuttrap effiation
	Texbook:	There is no textbook.
	Other material	Required reading and other reference material is posted on this website.
	Prereqs	No hard prerequisites, but a background in ugrad-level digital communications and C-style coding is required.

Syllabus

We will cover stuff in lectures, which you will have to know for the exam (yeah, I know, very informative, but we will update the syllabus soon)

Academic dishonesty

Cheating, plagiarism and any other form of academic dishonesty (e.g. allowing others to copy your work) will not be tolerated. There is a zero-tolerance policy in effect. Cases of cheating will be reported to the department. You risk possible suspension from UCSD, and a severe impact on the grade for this course.

Reference: This is currently the third installment of the course and has changed each time it was taught. The initial offering was in large parts inspired by Mani Srivastava's EE206A course at UCLA [http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee206a/2002s/]. The webpage of ECE102 Fall 03 served as a design basis for these pages [http://ece-classweb.ucsd.edu/archive/fall03/ece102/].