# Challenges for Teaching Wireless Communications Standards at the Graduate Level
## 2 Problems in Teaching Wireless Communications Standards  
Companies and research institutions are mainly involved in the wireless standardization process. The standards are often written as technical reports, specifications by telecommunications experts, and business participants in a complex, concise form [5]. Theoretical concepts, algorithms, and parameters are considered well known (as for the experts in the field); therefore, it is very difficult for the students to read and study directly the releases or series of standards. For example, the 3 GPP TR36.814 v9.00 \"Further advancements for E-UTRAphysical layer aspects\" document of the LTE system specifies the uplink and downlink transmission schemes for spatial multiplexing and transmit diversity with different multiple antenna configurations. The reader should be already familiar with the characteristics and technical advantages of the different MIMO techniques to understand this specification. Therefore, the teacher has to teach (i) first of all, the basis of MIMO techniques, explaining that the transmit diversity technique improves the reliability (i.e., bit error rate performance) by combating the fading multipath and that it is useful for delay sensitive services, while the MIMO spatial multiplexing methods achieve higher peak data rates by enabling multiple data stream transmissions between the eNodeB and the User Equipment (UE), and (ii) then, he/she can analyze the MIMO schemes considered by 3 GPP Series 36 with the students. Another problem is related to the updates of the successive versions of standards' specifications, referring often to other documents, increasing the difficulty in tracking and reading. For example, the phrase in 3 GPP TR 36.814 v9.00 on page 12 Control signaling is multiplexed with data on PUSCH according to the same principle as in Rel-8\" requires remembering or reading about uplink multiple access in Release 8. Another difficulty in reading the standards series derives from the large use of acronyms, even if a list of acronyms is reported in all the documents. Moreover, in the teaching of a course based on wireless communications standards, the teacher needs continuous updating and training of knowledge (i) to follow the evolution of standards, e.g., the standards for the mobile systems 2G, 3G, 4G, up to the new 5G cellular systems, (ii) to analyze the different characteristics of several wireless systems such as cellular systems, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee, and (iii) to understand the differences of the releases of the same standard. For example, considering the evolution of the 3 GPP standards (up to 2015), some releases introduced new network system architectures and air interface technologies such as in Release 8 (2009), where the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system was defined. In this all-IP network architecture, the circuit switching domain is not present with respect to Release 99 (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) -Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS)). In Release 8, the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access/Single Carrier-Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA/SC-FDMA) techniques are adopted, while UMTS uses Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) as the air interface technology. Other releases do not modify fully the system architecture, but consider the improvements of performance with new methods such as the use of adaptive modulation and coding (in Release 5), carrier aggregation, and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technologies (in Release 7 and Release 13), and other releases address new aspects such as Cooperative Multipoint Transmission (CoMP), Heterogeneous Networks (HetNet) improvements (in Release 11), Machine Type Communications (MTC) (in Release 13), or D2D communications under cellular networks. Another example can be the family of IEEE 802.11 (first version in 1997) with the successive versions such as IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE802.11g, and IEEE802.11n to improve the data rate in the 2.4 GHz and 5.4 GHz bandwidths.