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The combination of unlicensed spectrum, cheap wireless interfaces and the inherent convenience of untethered computing have made 802.11, Bluetooth, and similar wireless networks ubiquitous in the enterprise. Modern universities, corporate campuses and government offices routinely deploy scores of access points to blanket their sites with wireless Internet access. More recently, neighborhoods and municipalities have begun to deploy wireless mesh access networks. However, while the fine-grained behavior of the 802.11 protocol itself has been well studied, our understanding of how to address the challenges facing large 802.11 networks is surprisingly limited. A great deal of research over the past few years has focused on studying and improving the performance of these deployments.

This course will survey seminal and recent work in wireless networking, focusing on enterprise and mesh 802.11 networks. We will approach the topic from a systems perspective, generally focusing on the MAC layer and above, although we will begin with a brief overview of the physical link characteristics. We will consider a number of proposed mechanisms for routing, forwarding, and end-to-end packet transport, in addition to techniques to improve the performance, reliability, and energy savings.

No EE background or previous wireless coursework is required, although general networking knowledge is expected.