COURSE 06 · CELLULAR SYSTEMS

Understand Cellular Networks

Connect the radio engineering toolbox to LTE, 5G NR and the Radio Access Network. See how familiar ideas—waveforms, synchronization, framing, channels and link budgets—scale into a cellular system.

The big picture: Information Source → Transmitter → Channel → Receiver → User of Information. Cellular adds coordination, mobility, scheduling and a network around that same fundamental radio link.

What you'll learn

Air Interface

Relate OFDM, resource grids, synchronization, reference signals and channels to LTE and NR.

Cells & Coverage

Understand sectors, frequency reuse, interference, link budgets and why cellular networks are designed as they are.

RAN Architecture

Build intuition for the UE, radio unit, distributed/centralized units and the wider network.

From 4G to 5G

See what changes—and what stays fundamentally the same—as systems evolve from LTE to 5G NR and Open RAN.

How we teach it

This course stays anchored to real signals and real systems. Rather than beginning with an alphabet soup of 3GPP terms, we start with the radio link you already understand and progressively add the machinery required for a practical cellular network.