Course projects are expected to use the NSF AERPAW platform for experiments related to 4G/5G wireless technologies. Exceptions to this can be made on a case-by-case basis if there is strong justification. The instructor will share possible project topics during the first weeks of the class.
Each project team is expected to be composed of 2 students. Exceptions to this rule can be granted by the instructor if they can be properly justified. In particular, larger projects can have 3 students, but there should be a strong justification in the project proposal that includes individual roles and clear responsibilities for each student. If any student prefers to work on a project individually, that is acceptable, but it should be strongly justified. Due to the difficulties of distance education students forming teams, they are allowed to work individually on the course projects. For team projects, the contributions of each team member should be documented in each project deliverable.
There will be three deliverables for the course project, and they should each be prepared using the IEEE conference paper template (see #5 below). All these deliverables will be submitted through Moodle, and it is sufficient that only the team lead uploads the deliverable to Moodle. As the naming convention for your project deliverable file, use “DX_LastName1_LastName2_LastName3” where X = 1, 2, or 3 that refers to the particular project deliverable. Please read the additional description below carefully and incorporate all necessary information in your project deliverable in order not to lose any points while grading your project deliverable.
D1: Project proposal (10%, one page). Your project proposal should have a title, a list of team members, an abstract, and a high-level description of your selected project topic. It should include an initial description of the topic to be researched using the AERPAW platform and the experiments to be done.
D2: Mid-semester progress report (30%, up to four pages). Your project progress report should show that you started working on your project and obtained some preliminary results. There should also be a discussion on what work remains for the final project report. The progress update should also include a paragraph on who contributed what to the project update. There may be feedback provided by the instructor and/or the TAs on your deliverable-1, which should be incorporated into your mid-semester progress report.
D3: Final project report (60%, up to eight pages). Your final report should be a comprehensive description of your findings from the project. It should incorporate the feedback from the instructor and/or the TAs from the first two project deliverables. It should include a table at the end that clearly describes who worked on what portion of the project. Any additional material beyond 8 pages can be included as an Appendix if desired. All references used should be explicitly cited within your report.
A tentative schedule for the deadlines for each of the deliverables will be posted on the course website.
The project proposal, progress, and final reports should all be written based on the double-column IEEE conference paper template that can be found at the following link: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html. Use of LaTeX (e.g., through Overleaf) over MS Word is encouraged for writing your reports. Plagiarism (e.g., copying/pasting from Wikipedia or other papers without providing citations and changing wording) will be heavily penalized during grading! Everything in your deliverables should be in your own words. You are allowed to use AI (e.g., ChatGPT) for gathering information for your course projects. However, any text written automatically using AI in your project deliverables should be highlighted in quotations and in italics, and a footnote should be included stating that the corresponding text is generated using AI.