Today’s computers are overwhelming wireless. Despite the ubiquity of wireless communication, today’s devices use a grab bag of protocols (Bluetooth, WiFi, 4G/5G, LoRa, NFC, etc.) and no one universal standard has emerged. This diversity presents a ripe pedagogical opportunity to introduce students to the fundamental tradeoffs and design decisions inherent to wireless communication and networking. Further, many wireless protocols are very accessible to study in a classroom (in fact, many we all use daily), and lend to a very hands-on course.

We report on our experience teaching a new “Wireless Networking for the Internet of Things” course in three universities and across six offerings, with sections both in quarters and semesters format and at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. We share the scope of the covered topics, our approach for making the course interactive and hands-on, lessons learned from multiple iterations, adaptations to fit withing different prerequisite chains, and different structures to adapt to different delivery formats.