Next week, the DARPA-sponsored Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) to invent a better way to dynamically carve up and use of electromagnetic spectrum will hold its first information days. The information sessions are among the first concrete steps in what will be a long haul for teams – the winning designs aren’t expected until lat 2019. The team whose radio design most reliably achieves successful communication in the presence of other competing radios could win as much as $3,500,000.
It’s no secret the spectrum scarcity problem has been growing for years: the current practice of licensing fixed chunks of spectrum is already short on available bandwidth and will soon be swamped by demand from the frenetic proliferation of wireless devices.
As described by DARPA, competitors will “develop a new wireless paradigm in which radio networks will autonomously collaborate and reason about how to share the RF spectrum, avoiding interference and jointly exploiting opportunities to achieve the most efficient use of the available spectrum. SC2 teams will develop these breakthrough capabilities by taking advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and the expanding capacities of software-defined radios.”
Both information days will be held as both a live town hall style meeting at DARPA and as a webinar. These information sessions are a chance to find out more about SC2, ask questions, and explore potential teaming opportunities. Meeting specifics:
- The SC2 Competitors Information Day will be held on August 10, 2016, 8:00am EDT. And is directed towards individuals, teams and proposers interested in participating in the competitive SC2 Tournaments by either signing up as an Open Track team or by applying to the Proposal Track by responding to DARPA-BAA-16-47.
- The SC2 Competition Architecture Day will be held on August 11, 2016, 8:00am EDT and is directed towards proposers interested in responding to DARPA-BAA-16-48. Successful respondents to this BAA will be providing research services in support of SC2 but not participating in the competitive events.
The broad idea, says DARPA, is not just to challenge innovators in academia and business to produce breakthroughs in collaborative AI, but also to catalyze a new spectrum paradigm that can help usher in an era of spectrum abundance. That’s a tall order, but necessary in an increasingly interconnected world where wireless devices increasingly dominate.
DARPA is encouraging interested parties to read the SC2 Rules Document ahead of time. Here’s a link to “SC2 Rules Document” from the Documents section of the JOIN SC2). Also, here’s a link to the scheduled events agenda through 2019: https://spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com/events/