2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Affordable Course Content and Open Education Resources for Undergraduate Courses Teaching Fundamentals of Wireless Communications and Networking

Presented at Electrical and Computer Engineering Division (ECE) Technical Session 15

Wireless communication systems and networks along with the services they provide have become an essential component of the modern 21st century society, fueling job growth in the wireless industry and increasing the need for engineers specialized in wireless communication systems. As a consequence, over the past two decades, undergraduate courses teaching fundamentals of wireless communication systems and networks have become common in electrical and computer engineering and technology programs. At the same time, the number of textbooks dedicated to wireless systems and networks published by mainstream publishers has also grown, with availability in various formats and offerings and a significant increase in their associated costs. This makes the choice for education resources (textbooks and ancillary materials) challenging for both instructors and students and has prompted them to look for alternative resources including the use of textbooks available as part of the university libraries in electronic formats as well as other course materials and software that are available in the public domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others, which are referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER). In this paper we present the main topics that should be covered in an undergraduate engineering course on wireless communications systems and networks, aligning them with available OER and mapping them into a 14-week semester schedule with homework assignments that include programming and hands-on experiments. Assessment of the material adoption is also discussed in the paper.

Authors

Dr. 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.
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, control theory, signal processing and engineering education. She is currently a Professor in the Department
of Engineering Technology, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and she served for 7 years 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.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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