Smart Radio Challenge

The winners of the SDR Forum's 3rd annual Smart Radio Challenge were announced. The aim of this contest was to show the usefulness of SDR radios for distress applications. To this end the teams should develop a cooperative sensing scheme that allows the maintainance of a database of public safety emitters, including their location, physical layer parameters and which emergency team uses each emitter. The emergency scenario used to evaluate this cognitive radio system is a disaster area after a major earthquake:

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."

The winners are

• First place:
  University of Calgary
• Second place:
  Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Best Design:
  University of Calgary
• Best Presentation:
  Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• Best Report:
  Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Unfortunately I could't find any information about the spectrum monitoring techniques used by the winner projects. I will come back to this as soon as I can.