Two teams of graduate students within Wireless @ Virginia Tech took away top honors during the Software Defined Radio Forum’s 2007 Smart Radio Design Challenge held in Denver, CO, in November.
A team representing the Center for Wireless Telecommunications (CWT) won the competition’s grand prize by developing a software defined radio capable of finding available spectrum within a pre-defined band, rendezvousing with an intended receiver, and transmitting data over that band with a pre-determined quality of service (QoS), in urban conditions. The design heavily involved the use of “GNU Radio,” an open-source software radio development package, and the “Universal Software Radio Peripheral” (USRP), an inexpensive front-end hardware interface available for purchase on the Internet. In addition, the CWT’s team advisor, Dr. Charles Bostian, and his students were able to leverage their experience from research sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Both projects involved designing and implementing cognitive radios for a variety of applications, including public safety and emergency response. The team was awarded cash prizes totaling $6,000 and has been selected by the Software Defined Radio Forum to send a team to the 2008 competition.
Graduate students representing the Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group (MPRG), and advised by Dr. Carl Dietrich, won the “Best Design” in the Smart Radio Challenge for its approach to the problem of Spectrum Access for First Responders. This problem involved developing a radio system to establish digital voice or data connections among multiple radios using phase-shift keying (PSK) with quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The system was required to operate within the UHF Family Radio Service (FRS) frequency band, while avoiding interference to and from FRS users. The team’s Cognitively Intrepid Radio Emergency Network (CIREN) solution targeted the Lyrtech small form factor (SFF) SDR development platform. The design used the OSSIE core framework, an implementation of the Software Communication Architecture (SCA) that was developed by MPRG. The SCA is an open industry standard developed for the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program. The judges at the conference cited flexibility and extensibility as strengths of the team’s system design and considered it the prime candidate for commercial investment among the entries.
Congratulations to both teams for receiving these prestigious honors.
The Software Defined Radio Forum is a non-profit international industry association dedicated to supporting the development and deployment of software defined and cognitive radio technologies that enable flexible and adaptable architectures in advanced wireless systems.