Testbed-assisted learning for digital communications courses

We introduce testbed-assisted learning as an effective means for teaching digital communications. Laboratory teaching activities of digital communications courses benefit very much from utilizing a hardware testbed, since it greatly facilitates the understanding of very important effects introduced by real-world transceivers. We overcome the main drawback of communications hardware, i.e. the cumbersome low-level programming interfaces provided by hardware manufacturers, by introducing a distributed multilayer software architecture. This architecture provides different abstraction levels to access hardware testbeds, releasing students from the low-level interaction with the hardware. Also, the distributed nature of this architecture results in a high flexibility of operation. This way, students can focus on learning communications topics without devoting any time to low-level programming, that is usually out of the scope of digital communications courses. Thanks to testbed-assisted learning, they are able to perform illustrative experiments to understand digital communications concepts The authors are with the Department of Electronics and Systems, University of A Coruña, Spain. Mailing address: Facultad de Informática. Campus de Elviña, s/n. 15071 A Coruña. Spain. Tel.: +34 981167000. Fax: +34 981167160. e-mail: {jagarcia,pcastro,mgonzalezlopez,adriana}@udc.es