2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Collaborative Online Interactive Laboratory on Software Defined Radio Fundamentals

Teaching of fundamentals of communication systems varies widely across programs in US and abroad, mainly due to the type of undergraduate engineering programs and the depth of the communications field within the curricula. The variety is spread across electrical engineering and electrical engineering technology programs, and programs with focus on telecommunications or which only offer core or elective courses in communications. Adding to the variety, some programs include hands-on laboratory courses, others include simulation-based laboratories most of the time using Matlab, while others may only include lecture courses with no labs. The accessibility of the new software defined radio (SDR) platforms offers the option to introduce unexpensive hardware equipment to support the laboratory component of any communications course setting. This paper presents a collaborative online interactive laboratory (COIL), a partnership between an electrical engineering technology program in US and a telecommunication systems program in Europe, both undergraduate programs. The laboratories rely on using two hardware platforms, the RTL-SDR software defined radio receiver and the ADALM Pluto SDR. The paper presents the collaboration settings, describes the experiments used for the labs, and also discusses how the interactive online collaborative labs were received by the students.

Authors

Dr. Otilia Popescu Old Dominion University [biography]

Dr. Otilia Popescu received the Engineering Diploma and M.S. degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania, and the PhD degree from Rutgers University, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research interests are in the general areas of communication systems, wireless communications, control theory, signal processing and engineering education. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Technology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She served as the Program Director for the Electrical Engineering Technology Program. In the past she has worked for the University of Texas at Dallas, University of Texas at San Antonio, Rutgers University, and Politehnica University of Bucharest. She is a senior member of the IEEE.
Dimitrie C Popescu Old Dominion University [biography]

Dimitrie C. Popescu received the Engineering Diploma with specialization in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. His research interests are in the area of wireless communication systems and include software defined and cognitive radios, spectrum sensing and dynamic spectrum access for cognitive radios, modulation classification, interference mitigation and transmitter/receiver optimization to support quality of service, vehicular networks, and signal processing for communications and radar systems. Dr. Dimitrie Popescu has served as ONR Senior Faculty Research Fellow at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, and has also held summer prositions with AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, and with Telcordia Technologies (formely known as Bellcore) in Red Bank, NJ. He is an active Senior Member of the IEEE currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Sensors Letters and participating regularly in the technical program and organizing committees for the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (Globecom), IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), and IEEE Vehicular Technologies Conference (VTC). He has also served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Letters, and the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society.
Emanuel PUSCHITA

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025