The Wireless Innovation Forum has announced the winners of the 3rd annual Smart Radio Challenge, a worldwide competition in which student engineering teams design, develop and test software defined and cognitive radio technologies that address specific problems.
Six qualifying teams addressed the following scenario: An earthquake occurrence centered in a major metropolitan area measuring 10.0 on the Richter scale. Existing communications infrastructure is out, and as emergency medical services, police, fire, state and federal emergency management personnel arrive on the scene from all over the world, they all begin setting up their own communications systems to aid in rescue efforts.
As more and more personnel arrive, finding available spectrum becomes a challenge resulting in unintentional interference between communications of various services.
Teams had to develop a cooperative sensing system that will create and maintain a database of public safety emitters on the scene, and an association to which emergency team is using this frequency. They were required to use Matlab to model the possible RF Environment for these various public safety applications.
Winners were:
- First place and a scholarship prize of $4000: University of Calgary team
- Second place and a scholarship prize of $3000: Tokyo Institute of Technology team
- Best Design and a scholarship prize of $2000: University of Calgary team
- Best Presentation and a scholarship prize of $2000: WPI team
- Best Report and a scholarship prize of $1000: WPI team
“The Smart Radio Challenge represents a unique opportunity for graduate students to develop and forge their ground-breaking engineering talents and showcase their achievements to the SDR and wireless communities at large,” said First Place Team University of Calgary faculty adviser Fadhel Ghannouchi. The goal of the Smart Radio Challenge is to foster interaction between industry and academia and to expose students to the type of real-world problems they will face upon graduation.
A software-defined radio using software on a personal computer or embedded computing devices to emulate components that have typically been implemented in hardware, such as mixers, filters, amplifiers, and modulators/demodulators. Examples include the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), a program of the US military to produce radios that provide flexible and interoperable communications.
The Wireless Innovation Forum is a non-profit mutual benefit corporation dedicated to driving technology innovation in commercial, civil, and defense communications worldwide in SDR, Cognitive Radio (CR) and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technologies.
