April 28, 2009
For the third year in a row, Virginia Tech’s team has been selected to compete in The Software Defined Radio (SDR) Forum’s Smart Radio Challenge. For the 2009 competition, Wireless@VT’s two time award winning Team CWT will collaborate with the University of California at Irvine. The team will design a cooperative sensing system that creates and maintains a database of public safety radio nodes, tracking node location, waveform physical layer characteristics, and public safety team associated with the node. The competition will take place December, 2009, in Arlington, VA at the annual SDR Forum Technical Conference.
In 2007, Team CWT won the grand challenge prize by demonstrating an original Smart Radio System (SRS) design that automatically finds available spectrum within a pre-defined band, rendezvous with the intended receiver, and transmits data over that band with a pre-determined Quality of Service (QoS), in urban conditions. Several 2007 student team members counted their research and design hours toward Independent Study (IS) credits. The IS credits satisfied a portion of technical design elective requirements for undergraduates.
Team CWT won the 2008 prize for its problem 1 entry, “Communications from an Infrastructure Damaged Area”. The team successfully developed a smart radio system that can automatically create an ad-hoc extension to an existing communications network. The extension enables voice communications to be relayed between the incident site and existing communications systems along a path such as a subway tunnel where signals can travel only short distances.
The 2007 and 2008 teams were captioned by PhD student Mark Silvius and advised by ECE Alumni Distinguished Professor Charles Bostian. The 2009 team again plans to leverage experience gained from their current research projects sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Both sponsored projects involve designing and implementing cognitive radios for a variety of applications, including public safety and emergency response.
2009 VT team captain is PhD student Alex Young; members are U.G. student Nicholas Kaminski; M.S. students Terry Brisebois, Aravind Radhakrishnan, Rohit Rangnekar; PhD students Qinqin Chen, Feng Ge, Gyu Hyun Kwon, Jeanette Nounagnon, Ying Wang and senior graduate advisor Mark Silvius. This year they are joined by University of California at Irvine (UCI) student co-captain Hamid Eslami, advised by Assist. Professor Ahmed Eltawil. VT team advisor is Charles Bostian.
Contact: Charles W. Bostian bostian@vt.edu 540-231-5096