SIGITE 2005 Workshops

H9: A Portable Wireless Networking Laboratory Environment Workshop

Lawrence Hill & Bruce Hartpence

2:00 pm to 6:00 pm

Robert Treat Hotel

Title:  A Portable Wireless Networking Laboratory Environment Workshop

Intended audience:  This demonstration is intended for any faculty member interested in a unique, but at the same time inexpensive, method of providing a portable comprehensive wireless networking infrastructure environment for their students.  Lab managers and student attendees are also welcome.

This workshop serves a two-fold purpose.  Depending upon the experience and background of the majority of the attendees we will start with a basic introduction to 802.11b (otherwise known as "Wi-Fi") communications.  Then, the design methodology of the mobile carts will be outlined and the attendees will have a hands-on experience setting the carts up and configuring the network parameters and communicating with the various wireless equipments incorporated into the design between the two carts.  The second outcome will be a set of experiments to be demonstrated by the authors and performed by the attendees.  We will be bringing two of our fully-equipped carts to the conference to use in the workshop.  Weather permitting, we will take the carts outdoors and use them in exactly the same fashion as our students currently use them in our wireless concepts course.  If it's raining we can still do some of the experiments inside as well as cover the initial
overview of the equipment.

Materials provided:  Diagrams and schematics of the networking topologies used on the carts will be provided as well as the experimental writeups and student handouts used in the actual experiment demonstrations.  Of course, the procedure write-ups could be used with almost any wireless networking infrastructure--our cart design would not necessarily need to be implemented to perform the experiments.  Some experiments conducted might be, from simplest to more complex, 1) wireless communication parameter configuration and connectivity, 2) antenna gain measurements, 3) the Fresnel zone effect (interference to line-of-sight communications from nearby fixed objects) and 4) interference to 802.11b communications by interfering signals in-band and out-of-band.  We can also do some additional experiments, time-permitting, as suggested by the attendees.  These ad-hoc activities would, of course, have no prepared materials.

Registration is available through the SIGITE 2005 Registration Page.

Registration rate is: $90. each

Questions regarding any of these workshops should be directed to the Conference Co-Chair for Workshops, Jon Preston.