Abstract:

Focusing of the subject “Advanced Digital Communications” in Telecommunication Engineering teaching, the transference of knowledge of current digital communications techniques between teacher and student can be defined as a poor transference channel because students do not really learn the basis or fundamentals of these techniques since all techniques are based on complex mathematic and signal processing background which often blur the student understanding process. This poor transference channel is the main responsible that students will not be able to understand more complex communications techniques.

To enhance the transference of knowledge in this field, we propose a methodological change, based on European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) from the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which consists of adding leadership to the student by means of quality learning. This methodological change pretends increase the number of practice activities whose goal is to provide a complementary via of transference of knowledge that uses the simultaneousness of theoretical-practice concepts at the same time.

This work describes an original experience based on these principles of innovative teaching. The experience has been carried out the last two academic years in the subject “Advanced Digital Communications” for students belonging to Telecommunication Engineering Master in the University of Jaen (Spain). The main idea is to develop an advanced digital communications simulator using a PC. The speakers play the received sound signal while a microphone is the transmitter of the communication system. A program in MATLAB has been developed to be able to perform the transmission and reception over a multipath and noisy simulated channel. Two advanced digital communications techniques are been developed during this subject, specifically, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Spread Spectrum (SS) techniques. The simulation software allows the parameterization of each developed digital simulation in order to understand its performance over the simulated channel.

In this teaching experience, new material associated to advanced digital communications techniques has been generated. The student revises the material and interacts with the simulator in real-time in order to assert the theoretical concepts. The material and the simulation program will be available in the web-based platform ILIAS of the University of Jaen. In this way, the autonomous study is reinforced making use of the web-based resources.

Keywords:

Telecommunication Engineering, Digital communication, OFDM, Spread Spectrum, multipath channel, transference of knowledge, ECTS, AHEA.