University of Calgary Wins Smart Radio Challenge
The Wireless Innovation Forum announced the winners of the 3rd Annual Smart Radio Challenge last week.
The first place team was from the University of Calgary. That team also won the "Best Design" prize.
"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 Fadhel Ghannouchi, University of Calgary team advisor. "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."
During the challenge, teams of graduate students from universities around the world addressed a scenario involving an earthquake centered in a major metropolitan area and measuring 10.0 on the Richter scale. The incident has disabled the region's communications infrastructure, and as first responders from many different nations arrive, they all begin setting up their own communications systems. As an increasing number of personnel arrive, they discover that locating radio spectrum for their communications is difficult, with unintended interference to communications from various services.
The teams had to develop a cooperative sensing system that created and maintained a database of public safety transmitters on the scene, which included the location of the emitter, physical layer parameters such as modulation type and transmitting frequency, and also to associate the frequency and waveform with a specific emergency team. The teams were required to use Matlab--a special computer language developed for manipulating and plotting data-in modeling the RF environment for the various public safety applications.
Tokyo Institute of Technology's team was awarded second place. Two other awards went to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute team. Teams from Notre Dame, Penn State University, Stevens, and Virginia Tech made it past the qualifying round.
Additional information is available at www.WirelessInnovation.org.
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Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack. A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.