About wideband sensing hardware and the winners of the 3rd Smart Radio Challenge

Pretty busy these days: just a couple of hints. Related to the last post about wideband spectrum sensing I found the following paper that presents a wideband spectrum-sensing processor with reduced complexity achieved by taking advantage of the multitap windowing: A Low-Complexity Wideband Spectrum-Sensing Processor with Adaptive Detection Threshold and Sensing Time by Tsung-Han Yu, Oussama Sekkat, Santiago Rodriguez-Parera, Dejan Marković, and Danijela Čabrić. The interesting part is that they have built a prototype of the system and thus multiple practical issues are presented and studied in this paper.

I also would like to comment on the cognitive radio architecture winner of the Smart Radio Challenge. From the press release:

The system consists of portable base stations – each slightly larger than a laptop computer – and mobile communication units. A central command station is able to monitor the positions of all the rescuers in real time – including indoor locations where GPS signals don’t work – and issue instructions for their proper coordination in the rescue operation, even if there’s no existing mobile phone service."

The winner team, iRADIO team from the University of Calgary, consisted of 5 graduate students:

• K Rawat, Team Leader,
• R. Darraji,
• F. Esparza (visiting student from University of Navarra, Spain),
• M. Rawat, and
• A S. Bassam

Top picture: Astrocytes in culture. Blue color from from the astrocytes DNA and red color from the body. Credit: The Beautiful Mind, a spectacular online photo exhibition featuring images of the brain taken by neuroscientists.