Graduate-undergraduate interaction in wireless applications research and development

The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University is offering a new mobile communications project class for junior and senior undergraduate students. Students work in teams to design real-world applications for different mobile communications technologies. The wireless application development group is composed of several teams that aim to develop state-of-the-art wireless applications for IEEE 802.11 based mobile devices. Each of these undergraduate teams in this group is led by a graduate student, under the supervision of the professor. The research and development projects conducted in this group have led to a couple of conference papers and a journal paper in the past semesters. This paper describes the projects done in this group by the undergraduate students, presents the graduate student advisory experience, and the graduate-undergraduate interaction throughout the process, and suggests methods for such interactivity to be productive. It also discusses the impact of such interactions on the undergraduate students as well as on the graduate mentors.