WiMAX in the Classroom: Designing a Cellular Networking Hands-on Lab

Wireless networking has recently gained tremendous attention in research and education. Since the concepts taught in wireless courses are difficult to acquire only through lectures, hands-on lab experience is indispensable. While Wi-Fi based networking labs have been introduced before, to the best of our knowledge, labs that use a cellular technology have not been designed yet. Therefore, we present a WiMAX hands-on lab designed for a graduate course in wireless and mobile networking. The lab is based on the mobile WiMAX hardware and software developed and deployed within the GENI WiMAX project. We provide a brief overview of the course and of the main concepts taught in the WiMAX lecture. Then, we describe in detail our WiMAX network and the structure of the lab experiment. The effectiveness in achieving the learning objectives is evaluated via the lab reports submitted by the students. Finally, we review some of the lessons we learned during design and implementation of this lab. These can provide important insights to designers of similar labs

Experimenting with commodity 802.11 hardware: overview and future directions

The huge adoption of 802.11 technologies has triggered a vast amount of experimentally-driven research works. These works range from performance analysis to protocol enhancements, including the proposal of novel applications and services. Due to the affordability of the technology, this experimental research is typically based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices, and, given the rate at which 802.11 releases new standards (which are adopted into new, affordable devices), the field is likely to continue to produce results. In this paper, we review and categorise the most prevalent works carried out with 802.11 COTS devices over the past 15 years, to present a timely snapshot of the areas that have attracted the most attention so far, through a taxonomy that distinguishes between performance studies, enhancements, services, and methodology. In this way, we provide a quick overview of the results achieved by the research community that enables prospective authors to identify potential areas of new research, some of which are discussed after the presentation of the survey.This work has been partly supported by the European Community through the CROWD project (FP7-ICT-318115) and by the Madrid Regional Government through the TIGRE5-CM program (S2013/ICE-2919).Publicad