Experience in teaching a graduate course in mobile computing

The need for `information anywhere anytime' has been a driving force for the increasing growth in Web and Internet technology, wireless communication, and portable computing devices. The field of mobile computing is the merger of these advances in computing and communication with the aim of providing seamless and ubiquitous computing environment for mobile users. Mobile computing environments are characterized by severe resource constraints and frequent changes in operating conditions. This has motivated research in many challenging problems which span several areas of computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering, such as network protocols to support mobility, efficient and adaptive resource management techniques for wireless bandwidth and battery power, predicting mobility patterns, performance modeling and simulation of mobile applications, and supporting mobile real-time multimedia applications. This paper describes the experience of the authors in designing and teaching a senior/graduate level mobile computing course at Colorado State University. This course was designed for students in computer science, electrical engineering and computer engineering. The goal was to provide an in-depth understanding of the fundamental problems in the area of mobile computing and present the existing and proposed solutions for these problems from both research and development perspectives. In addition to regular homeworks and exams, students did term projects/papers to explore topics of their interest in more depth. Several mid-term and end-of-semester evaluations were done to gauge student satisfaction and short-comings of the course. These evaluations were very positive. Many students found the breadth of the information provided in the class very stimulating. Some students mentioned that they would have liked a course textbook along with the course material.