This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
By Courtney Morin ’10
As part of a senior design course, a group of electrical and computer engineering majors designed, built, and debugged a wireless communication network.
In this real-world, hands-on project, the students worked in small groups, where each group designed a network “station” that sent and received packets of data to and from stations designed by other groups. Much of the design work was done using field programmable gate arrays, chips that can be programmed to implement complex logic functions.
According to John Nestor, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the main goals of the project were to provide students with the opportunity to take on a sizable, open-ended task; to introduce students to the design process along with the implications of the industry; and to introduce students to basic networking principles using a “bottom up” approach. Nestor taught the course with Christopher Nadovich, lab director for electrical and computer engineering.
“A wireless network is an attractive project because it includes aspects of all the key subject areas of the ECE major,” says Nestor. “It also gives students exposure to economic, political, legal, and ethical constraints. An FPGA is an excellent platform for such a project due to its low cost, high functionality, and ease of programming using a hardware description language.”
W. Ben Towne (Litchfield, N.H.) will pursue a Ph.D. in Carnegie Mellon University’s Computation, Organizations and Society program in the fall. He believes the project was a good way to wrap up his Lafayette engineering experience.
“The project was a good exposure to a technical design experience and focused on the computer engineering and digital logic portions of the major,” says Towne. “I also learned just how quickly an apparently simple project can grow into a very large task once all the details, protocols, documentation, and tests are included.”
Other students in the course were John Acevedo (Easton, Pa.), Derek Alley (Hummelstown, Pa.), Alyssa Batula (Cleona, Pa.), Michael Cazzola (Oyster Bay, N.Y.), Michael Cuomo (Wyckoff, N.J.), Charles Donaldson (Riegelsville, Pa.), Rupesh Gajurel (Kathmandu, Nepal), Sriram Gopalakrishnan (Madurai, India), Andrew Jameson (Hagerstown, Md.), Eric Martocci (Bangor, Pa.), John Mikitsh (Bethlehem, Pa.), Jason Mills (Stony Point, N.Y.), Jacob Moore (Sterling, Va.), Clive Ntuli (Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe), Peter Paone (Philadelphia, Pa.), Tyler Pelton (Toms River, N.J.), Robert Schmid (Ellicott City, Md.), Colin Tareila (Brooklin, Maine), Kavinda Udugama (Kandy, Sri Lanka), Anthony Yesenofski (Allentown, Pa.), and Brian Yesvetz (Allentown, Pa.).