Wireless Innovation Forum Announces Winners of 3rd Annual Smart Radio Challenge

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Wireless Innovation Forum has announced the winners of the 3^rd annual Smart Radio Challenge (www.smartradiochallenge.org), a worldwide competition in which student engineering teams design, develop and test software defined and cognitive radio technologies that address specific problems relevant to the advanced wireless community.

“Once again the Smart Radio Challenge judges had their expectations surpassed by the innovation and dedication of each of the teams”

The competition was conducted in two stages, with a qualifying round and a subsequent problem-solving task. The six qualifying teams included:

Notre Dame
Penn State University
Tokyo Institute of Technology
University of Calgary
Stevens – Stevens Software Defined Radio Group
Virginia Tech
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

Each team 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, including the emitter location, physical layer parameters such as modulation type and transmit frequency, and an association to which emergency team is using this frequency and waveform. 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

“Once again the Smart Radio Challenge judges had their expectations surpassed by the innovation and dedication of each of the teams,” said John Irza, Smart Radio Challenge Chair and Technical Marketing Manager of Challenge sponsor The Mathworks.

“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. “I had the opportunity to mentor and advise, for a full year, the iRadio Team of the University of Calgary, and to witness their ingenuity, innovative thinking, and collaborative sprit which led to the proposal and development of a proof-of-concept SDR-based cognitive network for rescue and disaster situations. Certainly the Challenge is the way to go for students attempting to challenge themselves, discover their ingenuities, and unlock their innovative potential and creativity.”

The Forum has long been active in educational endeavours and has academic members that include universities in Finland, Germany, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Spain and the U.S. 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.

For more information on the Challenge, including past winners, please visit www.radiochallenge.org. For more information on the Wireless Innovation Forum please visit www.WirelessInnovation.org.

About the Wireless Innovation Forum

Established in 1996, The Wireless Innovation Forum (SDR Forum Version 2.0) is a non-profit mutual benefit corporation dedicated to driving technology innovation in commercial, civil, and defense communications worldwide. Members bring a broad base of experience in Software Defined Radio (SDR), Cognitive Radio (CR) and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technologies in diverse markets and at all levels of the wireless value chain to address emerging wireless communications requirements. To learn more about The Wireless Innovation Forum, its meetings and membership benefits, visit www.WirelessInnovation.org.