Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.18260/1-2--59339

Publication Title

2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Pages

15 pp.

Conference Name

2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, June 21-24, 2026, Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract

Wireless communication systems and networks along with the services they provide have become an essential component of the modern 21st century society, fueling job growth in the wireless industry and increasing the need for engineers specialized in wireless communication systems. As a consequence, over the past two decades, undergraduate courses teaching fundamentals of wireless communication systems and networks have become common in electrical and computer engineering and technology programs. At the same time, the number of textbooks dedicated to wireless systems and networks published by mainstream publishers has also grown, with availability in various formats and offerings and a significant increase in their associated costs. This makes the choice for education resources (textbooks and ancillary materials) challenging for both instructors and students and has prompted them to look for alternative resources including the use of textbooks available as part of the university libraries in electronic formats as well as other course materials and software that are available in the public domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others, which are referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER). In this paper we present the main topics that should be covered in an undergraduate engineering course on wireless communications systems and networks, aligning them with available OER and mapping them into a 14-week semester schedule with homework assignments that include programming and hands-on experiments. Assessment of the material adoption is also discussed in the paper.

Rights

© 2026 American Society for Engineering Education.

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2026 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference.

Original Publication Citation

Popescu, D. C., & Popescu, O. (2026). Affordable course content and open education resources for undergraduate courses teaching fundamentals of wireless communications and networking [Conference paper]. 2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Charlotte, North Carolina. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--59339

ORCID

0000-0002-2102-8139 (Popescu, D. C.), 0000-0002-5975-6529 (Popescu, O.)

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