Telecommunications Engineering MSc

As well as technical skills, this course deals with the non engineering aspects of telecoms engineering, such as policy and management, and professional, social, ethical, legal and global issues.

During eight compulsory modules you'll learn about data networks and digital transmission systems: their design, construction, testing, management, programming and usability, as well as threats to security and protective measures. You'll look at routing, internetworking, usability, clustering and IP addressing; modulation and demodulation techniques, channel coding and decoding, fibre optic communications and multiuser communication systems, using MATLAB and Simulink to simulate remote environments where connectivity is difficult. You'll look at the suitability of networks for particular applications, and the implications of different modes of operation, and will learn to develop commercially viable network applications. You'll do practical work on 3G/4G systems, learn to implement voice over IP systems, work with NI USRP software defined radio for physical layer signalling and design and deploy a simulated network.

You'll learn to use mathematical and statistical tools to evaluate networks and assess their performance, so the course will improve your mathematical skills as well as your problem solving, communication, time management and critical abilities.

A major part of the course, worth a third of your overall degree, is your independent project. You'll produce a piece of original research that's relevant to the industry: anything from designing a new kind of telecommunication network or an equalisation scheme for MIMO systems to investigating the quality of service in 4G networks or network security in SDN/NFV environments. Students have recently chosen to investigate the 802.11p medium access control model for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) using OMNET++, the impact of handover on the energy consumption of a mobile device in an LTE environment, and the implementation of an OpenFlow switch for SDN using Raspberry PI. The research methods module covers research techniques, data collection and analysis, academic writing, referencing and citation, and how to develop a research proposal. You'll present your project through a written thesis and a viva voce.

Modules

Year 1

• Computer Networks and Internetworking (15 Credits) Compulsory
• Data Communication and Information Theory (15 Credits) Compulsory
• Digital Transmission Systems (30 Credits) Compulsory
• Mobile Communications (30 Credits) Compulsory
• Broadband Technologies and Fibre Optics (15 Credits) Compulsory
• Telecommunication Security (15 Credits) Compulsory
• Project Research and Communication Skills Compulsory
• Postgraduate Project in Computer and Communication Engineering (60 Credits) Compulsory