DARPA's 'Battle of the ModRecs' - Fighting to Improve Wireless Communications
If human ears could hear the electromagnetic spectrum, the noise levels would be overwhelming. The increasing use of wireless devices in military and civilian domains has created a complicated environment, filled with signals of varying frequency and amplitude and multiple modulations. For soldiers trying to maintain critical communications links and interpret ambiguous radar returns, the ability to sort through these waveforms is essential - to identify where key signals are coming from, what kind of signals they are, and how best to send and receive information via the least contested spectral bands. In March, DARPA hosted the 'Battle of the ModRecs' - a low-key competitive opportunity for engineers with a penchant for antennas and algorithms to test their skills in modulation recognition.
Transcript
00:00:13 if you look at us commercially we all have a cell phone in the military we don't have a radio for every person but we would absolutely love to but it comes at the cost of increase demand and increase sophistication with how we use the Spectrum and that's just one of several examples of how we would like to better improve our Spectrum usage within the military classically we've described
00:00:37 the Spectrum strictly by occupancy there are signals present or not but as the Spectrum becomes increasingly filled we now need more veracity more information we have to actually say that there are signals present of a particular type and so modulation recognition is that first step towards getting Beyond just describing presence or absence but actually describing what is present so
00:00:59 we're here at the trip e dipan 2017 conference where I'm really pleased that we're able to present for the first time the battle of the modre darut obtained a special temporary Authority from the FCC to transmit over 10 MHz of bandwidth in a Time frequency grade different modulations in a random assortment the challenge then is for the teams to be able to receive that signal identify
00:01:20 where the signals were placed and do the modulation recognition on top of them you already know two modulations they're on the radio in your car uh am and FM amplitude modulation and frequency modulation but those are just two of a number of modulations here at the competition we are actually using 30 modulations that we're asking the teams to be able to tell us about but there
00:01:40 are hundreds of different ways of communicating information so it's a tremendously complex problem to take on so modulation recognition is the first step in understanding what's happening in the RF Spectrum uh if radios can understand primary users and identify users and then make predictions on what other people will be doing in the Spectrum or what other radios will be
00:02:00 doing in the Spectrum then we can efficiently try to fill holes and improve uh throughput and move data through uh Wireless Spectrum faster more efficiently one of the things I found interesting about the Battle of the modre is uh challenge aspect of it so ba participated in several other challenges and really brings new insight into the field uh a lot of times you're just
00:02:22 marching down the same train of thought it's really not until uh a challenge comes along that you think of things in a new way um really bring some disruptors into the field to take new approaches and learn new insights so what we learned at the event was that this is a much more difficult challenge than we had anticipated when we kicked this off it's exactly the kind of
00:02:42 challenge that that we want to see and we also want to continue to push forward as we're going to publish the data that we collected for the teams to continue working on for other teams to get access to and provide feedback so modulation recognition is really that first step into that full situation awareness that we require for our future work in the electrom Mantic Spectrum