System-oriented communications engineering curriculum: teaching design concepts with SDR platforms

Communications capabilities are becoming an integral part of common infrastructure, and are embedded in an increasing number of consumer products to enable the Internet of Things and networked applications. The proliferation of (wireless) communications has, not surprisingly, generated new demands for higher education. First, if we consider communications engineering students, we observe that they need to be readily equipped with sophisticated skills beyond the theoretical domain in order to successfully fulfill implementation tasks and tackle practical design problems. This requirement is particularly emphasized by their future industrial employers. Second, as the integration of communications capabilities becomes widespread, there is a need to also provide core competencies to non-communications engineering students and industry professionals. These students come from a variety of fields such as mechanical engineering and computer science. They want, and indeed need, the practical tools and knowledge to develop and test communications systems, but often lack the traditional electrical engineering and signal processing background. The curriculum and the way we teach these professionals have to adapt to new challenges. In this article we outline how close integration of software defined radios into the university curriculum can help the community meet some of these challenges. In particular, we describe our early efforts to re-engineer a part of our curriculum, and present our novel approach to merge laboratories and lectures to provide a more "hands-on" experience to a heterogeneous student body.