Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Report on university course based on DARPA Spectrum Challenge

[Tom Rondeau]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Fraida Fund <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi all,

I was a participant in the DARPA Spectrum Challenge last year.  Inspired by the Challenge, I developed a new course in which students learned about wireless communications and software radio in the context of a Spectrum Challenge-like competition. It was offered for the first time in Fall 2014 at the University of Thessaly, Greece, to a group of about 20 undergraduate and masters students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since the course may be of interest to some in this group, I am sharing more information about it here.

 
The infrastructure for the course (lab materials, software radios, compute devices, software and other utilities) were hosted by WITest, the GENI wireless testbed at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering.

In the first half of the course, students studied wireless communication and software radio basics through lectures and guided lab exercises. On their midterm exam, 50% of the points were earned by answering questions from this mailing list :) 

In the second half of the course, students (in teams) developed software radios and competed against one another in a format similar to the Spectrum Challenge. Students also presented their designs in a poster session attended by other faculty in the department. Two prizes were awarded: one for "the best innovative idea" from among the designs implemented for the competition (selected by the faculty committee), and one for the team that won the tournament.

The results (tournament visualizations, student posters, photos) are available on this page for interested readers.

I'd be happy to answer any questions about this course.

Best,

Fraida Fund

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering

Great stuff, thanks for sharing!

Tom