WiMAX in the Classroom: Designing a Cellular Networking Hands-On Lab

Wireless networking has recently gained tremendous attention in research and education. Since the concepts taught in wireless courses are difficult to acquire only through lectures, hands-on lab experience is indispensable. While Wi-Fi based networking labs have been introduced before, to the best of our knowledge, labs that use a cellular technology have not been designed yet. Therefore, we present a WiMAX hands-on lab designed for a graduate course in wireless and mobile networking. The lab is based on the mobile WiMAX hardware and software developed and deployed within the GENI WiMAX project. We provide a brief overview of the course and of the main concepts taught in the WiMAX lecture. Then, we describe in detail our WiMAX network and the structure of the lab experiment. The effectiveness in achieving the learning objectives is evaluated via the lab reports submitted by the students. Finally, we review some of the lessons we learned during design and implementation of this lab. These can provide important insights to designers of similar labs.