Experiences with student-developed software-defined radios in the Smart Radio Challenge

This paper discusses our experiences of participating in the Wireless Innovation Forum’s Smart Radio Challenge, which was established to promote the learning of software-defined radio (SDR) systems and techniques at educational institutions. As part of the challenge, each student team must build and demonstrate an SDR that addresses the problem(s) defined by the Wireless Innovation Forum and supporting the target waveform(s). The SDR domains provides a method to tie together many of the subjects in a typical electrical engineering and computer science and engineering undergraduate’s curriculum. Although student teams may choose to use whatever development environment they wish, we have had success with the GNU Radio development environment as well as the MATLAB Simulink environment. Simulink allows a model-based design approach, which allows students to take a systems approach to designing the overall SDR transceiver, which provides them with exposure to this important aspect of project development. In this paper, we discuss the overall structure of the Challenge and our experience with it; lessons learned and recommendations; and how we used various development tools to develop the resulting SDR systems.