Wireless Mesh and Vehicular Networks - aa 2018-19

Previous academic years details are accessible from the bottom of this page

Welcome in the official web site of the WMVN course (DISI - MSc in Computer Science) for the 2018-2019 academic. The information you find here is "official" meaning that it comes directly from the teachers, so it is probably the most correct and up-to-date you can find. Clearly this side does not substitute, but complements, the official education portal, with all its branches and global information, nor does it substitute ESSE3 for what your curriculum, exams, and all the career management is concerned.

Content and Goals

The course goal is understanding and learning to analyse, design and deploy wireless networks, and services upon them, based on short range communication devices, normally (but not always) based on 802.11 PHY and MAC standards (not necessarily the usual plug-and-play WiFi we are all familiar with). Teaching spans from the physical to the application layer, taking a holistic, cross-layer design approach to learn how to build networks that work correctly and efficiently support the applications they are meant for. Applications include Community Networks as liberation technologies to design alternative Internets over Wireless Mesh Networks WMN) and Safety as well as Cooperative Driving systems based on direct communication between vehicles (V2V Vehicular Networks). During the course the students will learn:

  • How to deploy a real WMN based on Open Source stacks and how to analyse its efficiency and performance;
  • How to design/study a protocol for Vehicular Networks supporting safety and/or cooperative driving applications.
The course is based on an overview (roughly 1/2 of the course) of the conceptual and metodological tools we need to build such networks (e.g., basics on 802.11 MAC functions, OLSR routing protocol, device coordination, etc.), while the remaining half of the course is experimental (or simulative in case of Vehicular Networks). The application part can lead to a project that will be the main body of the exam. Students that do not whish to do a project-based exam can take a standard written exam whose content is focused on the experience during the course.

Exams

Given the practical, cross-layer and olistic approach of the course, the logical way to show what you have lernt is to do a project, solving a given problem in practice, and then discuss what you have done in a colloquium in light of the theoric and methodological framework presented in class.

Bill Board

  • October 10 to 12 lessons are suspended for the graduation discussions

Meeting your teachers

All your teachers normally welcomes any question or curiosity during lessons or at the end of them. For specific questions or appointments just send an e-mail to one of them ... or to all of them for general questions where one of them may answer:

  • Renato Lo Cigno: locigno disi.unitn.it
  • Leonardo Maccari: leonardo.maccari disi.unitn.it
  • Michele Segata: msegata disi.unitn.it

Drop by the office without an appointment is in general instead a bad idea: very few chances to be received and a loss of time for everyone.

Teaching material

Slides are normally available before the lessons, so that you can associate your notes with them and you do not need to copy schemes and diagrams. Please, remember that slides are a trace fro the lesson, not the lesson itself.

  • Introduction, general notions and rehearsal of known concepts; exam methodology and projets
  • 802.11 MAC and data-link protocol
  • 802.11b/g/a/h/n/ac: a bunch of different technologies to improve transmission speeds. PHY and PLCP layers.
  • Vehicular Networks
    • Introduction to the topic, scenarios, applications benefits for safety and infrastructure usage: Slides
    • Technologies, Beaconing, and Routing in Vehicular Networks: Slides
    • Simulation of Vehicular Networks: Slides
    • OMNeT++ project and source code for the two simple TicToc examples seen during the lecture: Zip archive

Past Academic Years