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Testbed‐assisted learning for digital communications courses
Author(s) -
GarcíaNaya José A.,
Castro Paula M.,
GonzálezLópez Miguel,
Dapena Adriana
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
computer applications in engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.478
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 1099-0542
pISSN - 1061-3773
DOI - 10.1002/cae.20499
Subject(s) - computer science , testbed , computer architecture , debugging , software , software defined radio , coding (social sciences) , embedded system , implementation , multimedia , software engineering , operating system , computer network , telecommunications , statistics , mathematics
We introduce testbed‐assisted learning as an effective means for teaching digital communications. Laboratory teaching activities of digital communications courses benefit very much from utilizing a hardware testbed, since it greatly facilitates the understanding of very important effects introduced by real‐world transceivers. We overcome the main drawback of communications hardware, that is, the cumbersome low‐level programming interfaces provided by hardware manufacturers, by introducing a distributed multilayer software architecture. This architecture provides different abstraction levels to access hardware testbeds, releasing students from the low‐level interaction with the hardware. Also, the distributed nature of this architecture results in a high flexibility of operation. This way, students can focus on learning communications topics without devoting any time to low‐level programming, that is usually out of the scope of digital communications courses. Thanks to testbed‐assisted learning, they are able to perform illustrative experiments to understand digital communications concepts (e.g., source coding, modulation, space‐time coding, etc.) and to test algorithms without developing a new program from scratch, speeding up both the implementation and the debugging tasks. However, those students interested in hardware implementations can use the software architecture to access and interact with lower programming levels until they are as close as possible to the hardware. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 539–549, 2013