On interdisciplinary student background: A successful course integrating teaching and research

Abstract

Computer Science (CS) has grown into a discipline that has numerous applications in many different fields. As a result, CS graduate students come from a variety of academic backgrounds, including different science and engineering disciplines. In addition, some CS graduate courses attract students from other departments. To successfully deliver a graduate- level CS course, it needs to be designed and taught for interdisciplinary backgrounds to address the wide range of students, while still including advanced topics that are of timely importance to industry. This paper presents one such course, Mobile Networking. First, the educational and professional makeup of the student body is described. Next, the course content is presented, including the lectures, team projects, and mentoring efforts put forth to address the variety of student backgrounds and project interests. Two student projects, TCP performance over LTE networks and TCP supporting Video Streaming from the Cloud, are illustrated in detail. Since it was first taught in 2009, the Mobile Networking class has successfully produced several student-authored, refereed conference and journal publications and has helped students obtain employment in both networking and software engineering fields as well as prepared them for further Ph. D. studies.