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Course ID, Duration, and Instructor(s)

B-PROPANT, 4 days, Paul Kakaes or Max Main (click instructor photo(s) to see their bios)

Course Platform, Materials, and Certification:

• This is an instructor-led tutorial, taught onsite at the Booz Allen campus or an offsite facility chosen by BAH.
• The class will consist of lecture with a lot of interaction. Come prepared to ask questions and participate in the class discussions.
• You will be provided with a Participant Handbook containing a copy of the course presentation and other helpful materials.
• If you attend the entire program, you will receive an Eogogics course completion certificate.

Aimed At

• WSE Practitioner: Core Courses

Prerequisites

Course in a Nutshell

This course is dedicated to the principles and deployment of RF systems. You will begin by reviewing the developments of the past three decades to understand the structure and exploitation of RF systems in the historical context of the evolution of telecommunications since the divestiture of AT&T. This will be followed by an in-depth study of RF propagation and fading. Next, you will learn about the RF system components, with particular emphasis on antennas. The course will conclude with an examination of the issues related to the design and deployment of RF systems.

Our teaching methodology will use a three-pronged approach allowing you to understand the properties of RF systems vis-à-vis (a) the problems they pose to the communications engineers, (b) solution approaches that have been employed in the past and current systems, and (c) solutions approaches (along with their pros and cons) that will likely be used in the future. To help you understand the problems/solutions at their most practical level, we will rely on actual examples from past and present RF systems.

Course Outline

Day 1: RF Systems in the Context of Telecommunication Networks

• Telecommunications Since the AT&T Divestiture
  • “Ma Bell” days up to the early 1980’s
  • Telecommunication networks in the US
    • Consent decree, new smaller AT&T, birth of “Baby Bells”, and of mobile communications and corresponding players
    • M&A activity in telecom networks, both fixed and mobile
    • “Death” of AT&T and birth of at&t
    • DARPA development of ARPANET and the emergence of the Internet
    • Structure of telecom networks: Hierarchical versus non-hierarchical network architectures in fixed networks, “last mile”, local loop & central office, wireless networks RAN (Radio Access Network) and CN (Core Network), Network Operations Center (NOC), etc.
• Evolution of RF Systems
  • Point-to-point technologies: Copper link, coaxial cable link, fiber link, Radio Frequency (RF) links, Satellite links
  • The RF spectrum: How many cycles/sec (Hz)? From 0 to infinity
  • Overview of wireless communications by generation: 0G, 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and beyond?
    
    

• RF Propagation
  • Propagation versus fading: Defining the concepts and their communication engineering meaning
  • Propagation modeling: The problem and proposed solutions (none of them very good, so the problem is still on the table!)
    • Free space model and its applicability in RF systems
    • Plane earth model and its use, limited as it may be
    • Modeling in “real environments”: Dense urban (“Manhattan”), urban (“Dallas”), suburban (Southern CA), rural (Kansas), mountain microwave links (Vail to Aspen), large water bodies (islands of Greece), mixed water/land/hills (San Francisco), etc.
    • Measurements and measurement-based model optimization issues
• Fading: One Name, Many Faces
  • Slow versus fast
  • Flat versus frequency selective
  • Negative “excursions”: Bad news; Positive “excursions”; ? news
  • Delay spread and coherence bandwidth
  • Mitigation techniques: Past, current, and forward looking (to varying level of detail)
    
    

• RF System Components, Design, and Deployment Strategies
  • Where it starts and ends: Antennas
  • Antenna concepts, properties, and therefore implied usage
  • Transmitted power versus received power: Necessity to do Link Budget Analysis (LBA) and LBA components
  • Signal strength and performance issues: RSSI, BER, and other Key Performance Indicators (“KPI’s”) and why they are often misused
  • System non-linearities and generation of Inter-Modulation (IM) products (harmonics) and associated performance degradation
  • Principles of traffic engineering and how they affect dimensioning the RF portion of a wireless network
  • Deployment processes and associated design and optimization tools and their usage
  • Significant differences of design/deployment/optimization strategies used in past (and to a degree present) systems versus future systems
• An Overview of Evolutionary Forces in Wireless Networking and Course Summary
  • Internet and multimedia: At home and on the go
  • Convergence to an all-IP architecture
  • Concluding remarks

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