Considerations for the design of a hands-on wireless communications graduate course based on software-defined radio

Essentially, a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver can be described as a radio divided into two different parts. One, the analog front-end, down-converts and samples an RF wireless signal. The other, a back-end implemented in software or digital hardware, processes the samples and recovers the transmitted information, whether it is audio, video, instrumentation data, or whatever else. An SDR transmitter performs the opposite operations. Software-defined radio has opened up tremendous education opportunities. Probably the most intriguing one is to give students the ability to experiment with actual physical signals and systems. Another benefit is that the analog front-end is flexible enough to cover a very large frequency range, allowing students to use the same device to transmit and receive a very large variety of signals. Finally, all this can be achieved without students having to design RF electronic circuits, a subject that deserves its own dedicated course. However, actually realizing the potential educational benefits promised by SDR is far from trivial. In particular, this subject has not been deeply explored in the specific context of a telecommunications engineering technology curriculum. In this paper, we offer some reflections about the experience of designing a graduate elective course on wireless communications based on SDR. We cover aspects such as prerequisites, choice of platform, and selecting appropriate educational objectives and cognitive progression. Since the digital back-end performs many functions necessary for retrieving the information from the received signal (such as carrier acquisition, symbol and frame synchronization, filtering, decimation, de-interleaving, and error control), it becomes crucial to decide how students should tackle these problems, and in which order. We also present concrete examples of student assignments that use an SDR.