Course's introduction and rules

The ultimate goal of the course is to provide students with a broad understanding of the potential of ICT in industry and business services. Through a well-structured sequence of frontal academic lectures and seminars offered by professionals working in top-tier industrial sectors, the course will explain how communication technologies and services are revolutionizing a variety of production sectors and how they can be profitably used in some specific use-cases, including automotive, industrial 4.0, and retail. The topics will be first introduced from an academic perspective and then presented with a more practical perspective by professionals working in that sector. The course will be complemented by hands-on lab experiences with industrial development kits and cutting-edge networking devices.

The syllabus for this year features the following topics and industrial seminars/labs:

• Introduction 
  
• Introduction to the course: objective, lectures, seminars, labs. Overview of industrial sectors and their taxonomy, overview of ICT pillars for Industry 4.0 
• Open research topics in the ICT domain 
• Wireless access for industrial applications
• Seminars by Huawei: 5G and B5G for industrial scenarios
• ICT for the automotive industry
  
• Infineon: Introduction to AURIX board for automotive applications. 
  
• Infineon: Lab with AURIX board (implementation and running of simple procedures)
• Bluewind – Communication protocols in Automotive: CANbus
• Internet of Things 
  • Principles of IoT
  • Reading data from sensors through MQTT
  • IoT & e-health: signals collection and analysis
• Smart Networks
  • Software-defined networking: principles and experimentation 
  • Network Slicing principles
• Companies visit 
  • Visit to SMACT: Smart Competence Center
  • Visit to VSIX, the University of Padova Internet exchange
  • Visit to Infocamere datacenter 

Each module is organized as follows:

• introduction and explanation of the topic
  
• lab experience to let students practice with the very basics of the topic
  
• mandatory homework on a slightly more advanced topic 
  
• even more advanced topics proposed for the final course project 
  

Exam

The exam consists in:

• delivering all the assigned homework in the due time (deadlines are firm, no exception allowed!)
• peer-reviewing other students homework 
• take a multi-choice questions test covering the topics in the course's syllabus
• develop a final-course project in a team of three or four  

The evaluation of each homework counts for 30% of the final grade, the multi-choice questions test counts for 30%. The evaluation of the final project for the remaining 40% of the grade. If two or more homework will not be delivered in the due time, the exam is failed.  

Preliminary & mandatory steps

Here are the preliminary steps required BEFORE the first lab, i.e. as soon as possible:

1. check that your DEI account is working (try to connect to https://mail.dei.unipd.it); if you do not have a DEI account, create your brand new DEI account using Unipd SSO credentials to connect to this form https://www.dei.unipd.it/nuovoaccount and test it. If you need assistance, contact Simone Friso simone.friso@unipd.it (but it will not be a good starting...)
   
2. Review basic networking concepts (ISO/OSI models, switch, router, routing algorithms, ...)  
3. Review basic Linux commands (don't you know Linux? Check out the many tutorials you find in the Internet and make practice!)
4. Review your C++ & Python programming skills (don't you have any? You'd better study it!)
5. Get familiar with the AURIX Development Environment (IDE), watch the Video training here:
   1. (mandatory) Getting started with AURIX™: AURIX™ Unleashed