IIT Madras Offers Free Online Course on Wireless and Cellular Communications for Engineers

IIT Madras has offered a free online course on Wireless and Cellular Communications for engineers on the NPTEL platform. The 12-week long course is meant for engineers who are pursuing or have completed electrical, electronics and communications engineering, or communication and signal processing. Participants must have an understanding of analog and digital communications and digital signal processing to take the course.

Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of State for Education, Communications, Electronics and IT, Government of India, said about the course “A great opportunity for engineering students who have completed a course in digital communications.” The course will be conducted by professor R David Koilpillai who is currently the Faculty Coordinator of the IIT Madras SAT Student Satellite initiative.

Topics that IIT Madras Free Online Course for Engineers Will Cover

The course aims at providing an in-depth understanding of the wireless channel and the related impairments, small-scale and large-scale propagation effects, understanding of the design of cellular systems, a detailed discussion of multiple access, antenna diversity, MIMO, and wireless channel capacity among other topics through the following modules:

• Overview of cellular systems and evolution 2G, 3G, 4G or 5G.
• Cellular Concepts: Frequency reuse, Cochannel and Adjacent channel Interference, C/I,  Handoff, Blocking, or Erlang Capacity.
• Wireless propagation: Link budget, free-space path loss, noise figure of receiver, multipath fading, shadowing, fading margin, and shadowing margin.
• Antenna diversity.
• Wireless channel capacity.
• MIMO.
• CDMA.
• OFDM and LTE.
• Large scale propagation effects and channel models.

The course will be conducted from 26 July to 15 October 2021, and the last date to enroll for the same is 2 August 2021. BE, BTech, ME, MTech, or PhD students who have completed digital communications may apply for the IIT Madras free online course by clicking the “Join” icon on the NPTEL platform: https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/noc21_ee66/preview