ECE Team Wins Spectrum-Sharing Radio Contest

Soaring past the anticipated-favorite teams from Tennessee Tech and the University of Crete, a team of students from NC State’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering emerged the winner of the Spectrum-Sharing Radio Contest hosted at Virginia Tech.

Soaring past the anticipated-favorite teams from Tennessee Tech and the University of Crete, a team of students from NC State’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering emerged the winner of the Spectrum-Sharing Radio Contest hosted at Virginia Tech.

The team, advised by ECE professor Dr. Mihail Sichitiu and Computer Science professor Dr. Muhammad Shahzad competed in two phases of the competition prior to the finals held at the Wireless @ Virginia Tech Symposium, June 1-3, 2016. Dubbed “Team Dinamico”, the team comprised four ECE graduate students – Sameera Magapu, Venkata Nagasree, Arya Venkatagiri, and Srikar Potta.

Cognitive radios would actually put the “smart” in smartphones, with the radio determining the best way to operate in any given situation, rather than blindly following a series of predefined protocols, as is the case of traditional radios. Cognitive radios are capable of configuring to their environment as well as their user’s needs, making them similar to living being that are constantly aware of their surroundings, capabilities, and constraints.

The challenge used Cognative Radio Test System (CRTS), a framework developed for cognitive radio experimentation and performance measurement, and Virginia Tech’s internet-accessible CORNET cognitive radio testbed to measure performance of student-designed cognitive or adaptive dynamic spectrum access radios in their challenging operational environments.

Backed by a Motorola Solutions Foundation Innovation Grant, Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Wireless @ Virginia Tech research group, the contest is a student design challenge with the winning team receiving $5,000 in prize money.

In Phase 1, where Dinamico was ranked third, teams’ source-code submissions were tested in signal environments generated by the contest organizers, including ones with ambient interference and noise, and scenarios that introduced interference signals with varying characteristics. In Phase 2, the teams’ radio/controller combinations were tested in scenarios that included primary user links, requiring contestants to transmit error-free packets while minimizing interference to the primary user link.

Following Team Dinamico was Team Syknet from the University of Crete in Second Place, and Team Spectral Rangers from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in Third.