University of Florida, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

EEL 6509 -- Wireless Communications

Class Project Guidelines

General Objectives:

The project is intended to provide the students with an opportunity to take the initiative and develop independent research capability and creativity.  In the project, students are expected to identify problems of their own interest, tackle the problems from their own perspective, gain hand-on experience, and hopefully, have the fun of making their own discoveries.   The project will obviously require a good deal of time and energy, imagination and hard work.

Project Format:

The class project will be done in a group of at most four students, requiring about 30 hours per person over the entire semester.  A project includes the following phases: choosing a project topic, writing a project proposal, conducting the project, and writing a final project report.

A project usually consists of reading papers on a chosen topic, comparing performances of different approaches, and perhaps proposing your own algorithms/improvements, implementing one or two of them.  Alternatively, it can be a thorough survey of system development and commercial deployment.

• Your proposal is to describe the problems you want to explore, list references you have read, and specify your research objectives and how to achieve these objectives.    Before you submit the proposal, you can discuss with me about the possible topics, either during my office hours or through email.
• Each group only writes one proposal.
• Proposals are limited to 2 pages.
• Proposals must include the following parts:
  • Project title and group members
  • Abstract - A paragraph that briefly describes the research problems and what you plan to achieve.
  • Project plan - It should list tasks that you plan to carry out.  For each task, describe how you plan to approach it, who in your group is primarily responsible for it, and the deadline for completing it.  In addition to the reading/programming work you plan to do, you should also budget your time for searching the project subject, initial literature search, preparing the final report and presentation.
  • Reference list - List the references that you have read and are relevant to your project topic.  The references could be papers, documents, and web links.  Please include complete citation of each reference: author, title of the article, journal or book name, and the URL if appropriate.
• Email your proposal (in Word or PDF format) to the TA before the deadline.    

• Reports are limited to 10 pages.
• Reports must include the following parts:
  • Project title and group members
  • Abstract - A paragraph that summarizes the problem and the results.
  • Introduction - Sets the context, describes the problem, and describes your solution.
  • Description - One or more sections that describes the problem and your approach to the solution in detail.
  • Evaluation - A section that quantitatively evaluates your ideas.
  • Related work - Describes representative works related to your work, and summarizes the pros and cons of each work.
  • Summary and Conclusions - Summarize what you did and what interesting things you learned from the project.
  • Reference list

Hints for Coming Up with a Topic

Please feel free to propose any idea you want for your project.

There are two basic approaches you can use for your project.

• Develop a new idea or a new twist on an existing idea, and then do enough evaluation to serve as a proof of concept.
• Do an extensive evaluation of an existing idea that gives you some insight into the advantages or disadvantages of that idea.

Here are some suggested project topics.