Remote Wireless Communications lab in real time

Abstract

The ongoing integration of telecommunications with the learning and collaboration process has enabled many of the engineering projects to take advantage of the remote access to laboratories that it allows. However, most of the remote laboratories today are simulated or else real, but with a fixed configuration. With the integration of telecommunication technologies and computer science with virtual instrumentation, real, remote laboratories can be developed and accessed through Internet in real time, ensuring a richer collaborative experience for the student while avoiding some of the growing limitations of traditional laboratories, such as the lack of enough work area, expensive instrumentation, lack of personnel, time assigned to a laboratory, and their availability in non-working office hours. In this paper, we present a method of creating a web-based Remote Laboratory Experimentation in the MSc course “Wireless Communications Systems” which is part of “Information and Communication Systems (ICS)” curriculum. This is done within the RIPLECS project (http://riplecs.dipseil.net/). The course “Wireless Communication Systems” gives students an overview of the characteristics of different types of antennas used in wireless communications and the wave propagation in mobile communications. The practical part consists of several assignments dealing with understanding the basic functions of the antennas as well as mobile communication propagation characteristics experiments. The proposed approach integrates a traditional Learning Management System (LMS) with the remote access to real instrumentation located in wireless communication laboratory, without requiring specific software components on the client side. The remote laboratory system relying on virtual instruments (VIs) is described in RIPLECS. This paper presents our performance support approach to the design of the wireless communications course in DIPSEIL system (env.dipseil.net/v3). There are listed the tasks and their educational objectives.