Preparing Undergraduate Engineering Students for the Internet of Things

Designing technology that will be part of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires knowledge from a broad spectrum of technical areas including analog and digital communications, information theory, networking protocols, microcontrollers and electronics, electromagnetics, and more. That breadth of subject matter runs counter to the increasingly narrow focus of Electrical and Computer Engineering programs and enrolling in courses that cover that span is often not practical for students. In trying to prepare students for the IoT, some questions that arise are: Which topics should be selected and where in the curriculum should those topics be presented to them? In what context do we present the topics to them? Also, how should we teach students about IoT in a way that is accessible, while maintaining enough depth of coverage that students have confidence in their ability to contribute to the future of the field? We’ve addressed these questions by revamping our introductory computer networking course, gearing all of the selected topics towards the IoT. Our approach is to take the students through the evolution of wireless networks past and present, starting from early radio communication and cellular networks, to medium and short range wireless computer networks and then to active and passive RFID networks. Each specific network type is not covered extensively, but rather a few key technologies from each network are selected and covered in depth, thereby creating a conceptual “toolbox” of IoT techniques and methods for the student. Along the way, topics typically not included in traditional networking courses, but important to the IoT, such as microcontroller interfaces, antenna design and RFID energy harvesting principles are introduced to the students. In this paper, a detailed overview of this newly developed course and its content is presented. In addition, we show how the structure of the course makes it especially well-suited to address one of the more challenging ABET student outcomes to assess, outcomes dealing with the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context. Finally, the degree to which we are achieving our desired learning objectives is evaluated using the results of student opinion surveys and a direct assessment of student work.