Student team wins international Smart Radio Challenge

A team of Penn State engineering students was named one of the winners of the inaugural Smart Radio Challenge.

The contest, sponsored by the Software Defined Radio (SDR) Forum, challenged student teams to solve one of three problems. The teams were tasked with designing, developing and testing an SDR or a cognitive radio as part of their chosen problem.

The Penn State team won its problem category for developing a smart radio terminal that can automatically provide interoperability between radios with different modulations and knows how to forward messages to the proper network, whether commercial or civil.

The problem is based on a real radio issue where first responders to an emergency cannot communicate with each other due to the different types of communications equipment each group employs.

The Penn State team created a software-defined radio bridge that allows citizens’ band radio, family radio service and 900-MHz cordless telephones to work with each other.

The team included Eric Menendez, a 2007 computer engineering graduate; Matthew Sunderland, an electrical engineering student; and Ohktay Azarmaresh, an electrical engineering graduate student. Sven Bilen, associate professor of electrical engineering and engineering design, and Julio Urbina, assistant professor of electrical engineering, served as the team's faculty advisers.

Penn State was one of 43 teams from a dozen countries that registered to compete in the contest. Winning the challenge's other categories were Virginia Tech and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.