On March 23rd, 2016 DARPA announced its next Grand Challenge at the International Wireless Conference Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Program Manager, Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), made the announcement to industry leaders following the conferences Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit. The challenge will motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum and has been named the “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.” A top prize of $2million dollars has been announced.
While mostly transparent to the typical cell phone or Wi-Fi user, the problem of spectrum congestion has been a long standing issue for both the commercial sector and Department of Defense. The insatiable appetite for wireless connectivity over the last 30 years has grown at such a hurried pace that within the RF community the term spectrum scarcity has been coined. RF bandwidth, the number of frequencies available to communicate information over, is a relatively fixed resource, and advanced communication systems like LTE and military communications systems consume a lot of it. As spectrum planners prepare for the next big wave of connected devices, dubbed the Internet of Things, they wonder where they will find the spectrum bandwidth they need to support these billions of new devices. Equally challenging, is the military’s desire to connect every soldier on the battlefield, while using these very same frequencies.
DARPA has chosen Barone Consulting to help develop the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge to address these critical infrastructure and military operation needs. In the tradition of other DARPA Grand Challenges, the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge provides an opportunity for experts across a wide variety of disciplines to devise groundbreaking strategies and systems and compete in open competition to win prizes, while advancing the state-of-the-art and seeding new technology communities. For the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the tasks are to combine distributed sensing techniques, innovative RF transmit and receive technologies, and cutting edge machine learning algorithms to create radio networks capable of learning to collaborate with other unknown radio networks, in real time.
While working the problem of spectrum scarcity with DARPA, Paul Tilghman and Barone Consulting president Kevin Barone identified numerous shortcomings in conventional, human based spectrum planning techniques, which introduce significant inefficiencies into the allocation and reuse of frequency assignments. The realization that only the radios themselves have sufficient situational awareness of the RF environment surrounding them to be able to make transmitter and receiver assignments efficiently, combined with limited insight into the interference one radio exposes to another, dramatically reduces the number of options available to a spectrum planner. Considering that oftentimes spectrum planning occurs months, and sometimes years ahead of the radios’ actual use, it became clear that only by moving the planning process into the radio itself, could true real-time spectrally optimized solutions be realized.
Barone Consulting is very proud and excited to be part of this groundbreaking effort, which promises to revolutionize how spectrum is managed, while unleashing underutilized RF resources to the advantage of the commercial and military user. As we continue our work executing this program and overseeing the development of these new systems, we look forward to getting to know the teams and the remarkable technologies they will be developing.
Barone Consulting is actively recruiting and encourages strong candidates with Top Secret security clearances, systems integration, RF, machine learning, and national test bed experience to contact us regarding DARPA opportunities.
Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.baronedc.com
Information about the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge can be found at www.spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com
The original DARPA press release can be found at www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-03-23
About Barone Consulting
Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting provides system engineering and technical assistance services to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. They provide a cadre of elite subject matter experts to the government in support of game-changing, cutting edge technologies that help performers bridge the “valley of death” between R&D and fielded tactically relevant products. To find out more, please visit www.baronedc.com