  Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen
collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the
evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation
while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies
involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate
technical specifications to ensure diversity, compatibility and facilitate
worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that
can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the
specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex and minimalistic.
This makes the telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but
it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This
paper describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards.
We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the
standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled
by software-defined radio technology we describe a practical learning
environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft
skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency
components and regulation. Using only open-source software and commercial
off-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be
recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational
needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when
employing the proposed methodology to 4th generation (4G) long-term-evolution
(LTE) standard education at Barcelona Tech.
