Master of Science (MSc) course in Communications Engineering (CE)

Master course in

Communications Engineering

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Year 1 - Semester 1

Communication and network systems [Computer network design and control]

Network planning and management
Routing and QoS-routing
Cloud computing and virtualization
Software defined networking
Network slicing
Traffic control algorithms and QoS support
Congestion control
Data distribution systems

Communication and network systems [Communication systems]

Modern Communication Systems and their physical layer
Wireless channel models (AWGN, multipath fading, Doppler)
Multiplexing (TDM, FDM) and Multiple Access (TDMA, FDMA, CDMA, NOMA)
Frame synchronization, Randomizers
Introduction to error detection (CRC), error correction (block codes), and ARQ
Digital modulations (PSK, QAM, APSK)
OFDM modulation and its application
Use cases and relative Link Budgets: space links and 5G

Signal, image and video processing and learning [Signal processing: methods and algorithms]

Review of discrete-time signals and systems
Introduction to non-stationary random processes
Estimation theory
Spectral estimation
Time-frequency analysis
The Kalman filter
Detection theory

Signal, image and video processing and learning [Image and video processing and learning]

Multidimensional filters and transforms
Data, image and video compression
Convolutional and deep neural networks for image analysis
Generative adversarial networks

Machine learning for networking

Programming in Python: the language, numerical libraries, machine learning libraries
Introduction to machine learning
Linear dimensionality reduction approaches: principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis
Clustering approaches: agglomerative hierarchical clustering, K-Means, DBSCAN
Classification methods: Gaussian models and generative classifiers, logistic regression, support vector machines, decisions trees
Regression methods: ordinary and generalized least squares, support vector regression

Year 1 - Semester 2

Project: Software-defined communication systems

project management and planning
projects in these areas:

Ultra-high-capacity transcontinental optical links
Communication- and energy-aware mission planning and control for cooperative UAVs
Virtual services for autonomous mobile systems
Satellite link for communications and ranging
High-speed data-center links
Probabilistic and statistical tools to detect network attacks
Digital signal processing techniques to audio time series

project design, implementation and validation
final project presentation

Optical fiber communications

Optical fiber networks: scenarios of application
Introduction to the key optoelectronic components for optical fiber communications
Linear and nonlinear propagation effects in single-mode optical fibers
Intensity-modulated and direct detection (IM-DD) systems: performance and scalability in short reach scenario for datacenter and Fiber-to-the-Home optical access networks
PM-QAM coherent transmission systems: performance and scalability for long haul ultra-high bit rate fiber links
Long-haul reconfigurable optical networks (seminar given by external experts)
Quantum cryptography (seminar given by external experts)
Transoceanic submarine systems (seminar given by external experts)

Information and communication theory

Basic concepts from Information Theory
Source coding for data compression
Channel capacity and capacity formula for the additive Gaussian channel
An elementary introduction to block and convolutional codes
Channel estimation (Single Carrier and OFDM)
Adaptive Equalization ML and MMSE (Single Carrier and OFDM)
Iterative channel decoders (LDPC, turbo, polar)
Carrier, Timing and Frame Synchronization

Wireless access electromagnetics

Introduction to antenna as system components
Antenna system parameters
Noiseless and noise link budget
Low and medium gain antennas for broadcasting, mobile communications, WiFi/WLAN, IoT (slot, patch, dipole)
UWB antennas
High-gain, reconfigurable and MIMO antennas (arrays) with beamforming
Fixed beam, scanning beam MIMO

Year 2 - Semester 1

Project: Applied communication systems and IoT

project management and planning
projects areas (still to be defined)
project design, implementation and validation
final project presentation

Network measurement laboratory

Configuration of hosts in Local Area Networks, IP addresses management, subnetting/supernetting
Traffic monitoring using sniffers in LAN: TCP, UDP and HTTP
Performance measurement for file transfers in wired and WiFi networks
Impact of delay and packet losses
Analysis of traffic traces collected from real networks
Post-processing tools to extract information out of the raw data
Statistical methods and data mining techniques to find correlations and solve classification problems

Signal processing and optical transmission lab

Signal Processing laboratory:

DSP implementation of linear filters and their application to lossless audio compression
Program templates and input/output interfaces
Basic FIR and IIR filtering structures
Real-time filtering of audio signals
Lossless coding based on FIR predictors
Real-time lossless coding of audio signals, validation and testing

Optical Communications laboratory

Spectral measures of laser sources and their wavelength and power characterizations
Experimental procedure for the joint of optical fibers and corresponding measurement of the joint attenuation
Experimental characterization of passive optical devices
Realization of an optical amplifier and corresponding experimental characterization
Spectral characterization of optical sources through optical spectrum analyzers and high resolution methods

Signal processing and wireless transmission lab

Signal and Image Processing laboratory

Introduction to compression
Decorrelation techniques for signals and images
Quantization
Source coding
DSP architecture and development tools
DSP implementation of a compression algorithm
Program template and in/out interfaces
predictor, quantizer, lossless source coder
validation and testing

Wireless transmissions laboratory

Physical layer of broadband fixed and mobile radio-communication standards
Structure and main functions of conventional and software defined digital radio transceivers
Software defined radio (SDR) platforms Lab
Implementation on SDR platform (Ettus B210 and National Instruments USRP-2901) of some common transceiver blocks suitable for most wireless communication standards (WiFi, LTE, DVB)
Test and measurements of the performance of some implemented receiver algorithms

Open optical networks

State-of-the art transceivers for optical communications
Foundations of optical fiber propagation and modeling its impairments
Amplifiers and passive components
WDM spectral use and standards
ROADMs and node structure in general
YANG, Netconfig, GMPLS, OTN
Emulation of optical layer in photonic networks
Routing spectral and wavelength assignment
Multilayer orchestration
Physical-layer-aware network analysis, design and optimization

Computer system security

Computer systems (in)security: problems and attacks (sniffing, spoofing, DOS, ').
Basic protection techniques: steganography, cryptography, digest, X.509 certificates, certification authorities (CA) and public-key infrastructures (PKI).
Authentication techniques (password, challenges, Kerberos) and related hardware devices (token and smart-card).
Network security: the IPsec standard to protect IP networks; security of the network configuration and management protocols; firewall and IDS to create protected subnets; virtual private networks (VPN); security of wireless networks.
Application security: e-mail protection (PGP, S/MIME), web security (SSL, TLS) and remote access protection (SSH, SSL, TLS), securing web applications.
Secure document workflow and e-commerce; national and international legislation about e documents; digital signature and e documents; the SET protocol and other e-payment systems.

5G and next-generation mobile computing

5G and beyond cellular connectivity
Network architecture
Radio Access Networks
Edge computing
Mobile service virtualisation
Virtual resource allocation
Hands-on approach to mobile services
Service orchestration

Advanced wireless communications

Multivariate information theory
Review of linear algebra
MIMO channels
Water-filling
Capacity of a deterministic MIMO channel
Ergodic capacity of a random MIMO channel
Nonergodic capacity and outage probability

Satellite navigation systems

Localisation and positioning techniques, radionavigation principles
Uncertainty causes and error sources
Basics of reference systems and satellite orbits
Signal processing for radionavigation
System architecture of GPS and Galileo systems
GNSS receivers architectures
GNSS applications

Year 2 - Semester 2

Operational research

How to build a mathematical optimisation model
Computational complexity
Elements of network flows
Local search heuristics
Meta-heurisics (tabu search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, etc)
Applications to optical networks (logical topology design, routing and wavelength assignment)
Applications to green networking

Cloud computing and data center design lab

Cloud computing e virtualization
Data center addressing, routing
Data center topologies: leaf-spine, multilayer, Google Jupiter, hybrid optical/electronic switching
Traffic monitoring and stream processing: probabilistic data structures (hash tables, bloom filters, sketches, HLL)
Power-aware data center design

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