At its recent annual technical conference in Denver, the SDR Forum revealed the winning teams of its inaugural smart radio challenge, a worldwide competition in which student engineering teams design, develop and test a software defined radio (SDR) or a cognitive radio addressing specific problems relevant to the advanced wireless community. In addition, the Forum also released the names of the qualifying teams for the second smart radio challenge ’08.
Qualifying teams for the Smart Radio Challenge ’07 needed to address one of three defined problems, each supporting a target waveform. Out of 43 student teams participating initially from 12 countries, the three winners were:
- Virginia Tech CWT (Center for Wireless Telecommunications), which developed a smart radio system that will automatically find available spectrum within a predefined band and transmit voice or data over that band.
- 2. Pennsylvania State, for developing a smart radio terminal that can automatically provide interoperability between radios with different modulations, and which knows how to forward messages to the proper network, whether commercial or civil.
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3. The Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), which developed a smart radio system that can detect the location of many vehicles within the city, assess the velocity along common roadways, and then provide user-specific route guidance that will minimize total fuel consumption.
Grand prize winner was Virginia Tech CWT, with additional awards, for best paper and best design, presented to the University of Utah and Virginia Tech MPRG (Mobile & Portable Radio Research Group) teams, respectively.
