Teaching protocol exchanges over cellular air interfaces

The evolutionary path taken by cellular standards to the current and future standards is incomplete without fully understanding the older standards. The comprehension of the GSM standard, specifically the procedures for protocols exchange over the air interface will help students understand radio resource allocation procedures in GPRS and UMTS, and will ultimately assist future communication engineers to be able to design and solve problems related to these cellular standards. In this paper we describe the novel architecture of our teaching software, developed and programmed in Java. We present all the user interfaces and show how it can be used to assist in teaching, by presenting how the mobile station and the GSM/GPRS network exchange data frames over the air interface with their associated protocols. Finally the uniqueness of this teaching tool was proved from the stand point of our modular architecture.