TokyoTech Team Secured Second Place in the 3^rd Smart Radio Challenge 2009

TokyoTech team comprised of students from Takada laboratory, IDE have secured second place and a scholarship amount of $3000 in the 3^rd Smart Radio Challenge. Smart Radio Challenge is a worldwide competition among university students, organized by the Wireless Innovation forum (formerly known as SDR forum). Student engineering teams design, develop and test software defined radio (SDR) or cognitive radio technologies that address relevant problems in the advanced wireless technologies. Solutions presented by student teams are evaluated by a panel of industry judges, and one time scholarships are awarded to the winning teams. The competition is being held annually since 2007.

The problem statement for 2009 challenge is “An earthquake has occurred centered in a major metropolitan area measuring 10.0 on the Richter scale. Existing communications infrastructure is out, and as emergency medical services, police, fire, state and federal emergency management personnel arrive on the scene from all over the world, they all begin setting up their own communications systems to aid in rescue efforts. As more and more personnel arrive, finding available spectrum becomes a challenge resulting in unintentional interference between communications of various services.” Competing teams were expected to “Develop a cooperative sensing system that will create and maintain a database of public safety emitters on the scene, including the emitter location, physical layer parameters such as modulation type and transmit frequency, and an association to which emergency team is using this frequency and waveform. There will be at least 20 different emergency response teams present which will be trying to coordinate their activities.” Moreover the teams were expected to simulate a disaster environment for wireless channel model and investigate the performance of geolocation algorithms in a multipath scenario.

The competition was evaluated in two phases. A number of student teams submitted their proposals in the qualifying round. Afterwards, seven teams (stated below) were selected for the development round.

1. University of Notre Dame

2. Pennsylvania State University

3. Tokyo Institute of Technology

4. University of Calgary

5. Stevens Software Defined Radio Group

6. Virginia Tech

7. Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

TokyoTech team joined the competition by submitting the proposal in April, 2009. The team submitted their final report and presented the solution in a webinar to the panel of judges in April, 2010. Members of Tokyotech team are:

• Md. Abdur Rahman (Doctoral student, 2^nd year) (Team leader)

• Azril Haniz (Masters student, 1^st year)

• Santosh Khadka (Masters student, 2^nd year)

• Mutsawashe Gahadza (Doctoral student, 1^st year)

• Iswandi (Doctoral student, 2^nd year)

• Dr. Minseok Kim (Faculty Advisor)

• Prof. Jun-ichi Takada (Faculty Advisor)

TokyoTech is the only university in Japan that took part in the prestigious competition since its inception. The team acknowledges the help and support of the smart radio challenge organizing committee especially Mr. Lee Pucker and Mr. John Irza. The team is also thankful to the challenge sponsor Mathworks for providing individual licenses of MATLAB. Special thank goes to Kozo Keikaku Engineering Inc and Remcom for giving the “Wireless Insite” raytracing simulator. Finally the gratitude goes to all the members of Takada lab for various suggestions and support.

The team is now working to design and implement a radio spectrum management system for emergency communications.

Further details:

Smart radio Challenge website: www.radiochallenge.org

Final result announcement: (Click Here)

Wireless Innovation forum: http://www.wirelessinnovation.org

Takada laboratory: http://www.ap.ide.titech.ac.jp/