Course Project

Table of Contents

The goal of the course project is to get real experience with wireless protocols. You will do this by building, measuring, and experimenting with the wireless protocols around you. You are expected to work on this project throughout the semester. The project was designed to work with two people, but you can work by yourself if you prefer. The project must include some amount of building, measuring, or experimenting. For example, you could run an experiment to evaluate a wireless network or look at a wireless network’s performance, security, or usability.

To give you an idea of the scope of this project, here are some ideas:

  • Apply machine learning to a wireless networking problem.

  • Find improvements to state-of-the-art research and implement improvements.

  • Explore wireless communication within your field of research.

  • Do something with Matter.

  • Design your own wireless protocol from scratch using a SDR.

  • Build a tool that determines the wireless network characteristics (e.g., congestions, interference levels, etc.).

If you have trouble with coming up with an idea, talk to me. I have hardware that you can check out during the semester to work on your project:

For all assignments that get turned into me, only one person in your group needs to submit it.

Proposal

You will submit a one page proposal for your project. This proposal must give an idea of what you plan on doing throughout the semester and the expected outcome. The proposal must include the following:

  1. Your name and your partner’s name
  2. Introduction Motivate and introduce the problem you are solving.
  3. Related Work Summarize the existing work related to your problem.
  4. Methodology Describe your solution and any other methods you have used to solve your problem.
  5. Schedule Give a rough schedule for when you want to accomplish your project’s different parts.

Progress Reports

You will submit two progress reports. This is to ensure that you are working on the project throughout the semester. The progress report should include a description of what you have done so far and what you still need to do. It only needs to be a few paragraphs long. There is no specific format for the progress reports.

Written Report

Your report must be three pages long, and you must use this template for your report. Your report should not include any code. You must submit your code or make it available on a web page (e.g., GitHub) and provide the pointer to that page in your report.

The report should have the following sections:

  • Introduction Motivate and introduce the problem you are solving. Very briefly summarize your methodology, your experiments, and your important results.
  • Related Work Summarize the existing work related to your problem.
  • Methodology Describe your solution and any other methods you have used to solve your problem.
  • Implementation Describe what you designed and how you designed it. Get specific with the hardware/software you used.
  • Experimentation Describe your experiments and your results. Discuss your results.
  • Conclusion Summarize your work and your results and indicate any future directions.
  • References List all the references you have used for this work.

Presentation

At the end of the semester, you will present your project. Presentation should be 10 minutes, with 1 minute for questions.

Grading Rubric

Introduction (5 points)

  • Problem is clearly explained and motivated.
  • Contributions are clearly stated.

Related Work (5 points)

  • Mention other work that has been done in the past.
  • Distinguish contribution from other work.

Methodology (5 points)

  • What is the approach to solving the problem?
  • What was done to solve the problem?
  • Give an idea of the equipment you are using.
  • Give a high-level overview of all the components of your system.
  • If applicable, how are you collecting your data and why?

Implementation/Experimentation (5 points)

  • This section should contain the technical “meat” of the work.
  • Give enough technical detail to understand the problem and your work without getting bogged down with every small detail.
  • What are the specifics of the experiments you ran or what was built?

Results (5 points)

  • Results are clearly shown.
  • If applicable, data collected is visualized in some way.
  • What do the results mean? Apply the results to the overall problem.

Conclusion (5 points)

  • Were you able to make the contribution you had planned?
  • What went wrong? What went right? What are the lessons you learned from this project?

Future Work (5 points)

  • What could be done to extend your work in the future?

Presentation Quality (5 points)

  • Logical organization of material
  • Slides are clear and attractive
  • Everyone participated in the presentation equally

Project Artifact (5 points)

  • Report points to code written for the project
  • The code is well written

Project Scope (10 points)

  • The contribution of the project was in proportion to the number of people in the group (e.g., a group of two should accomplish twice as much as a group of one)