DARPA to Field Radio Frequency Emulator Tech in Spectrum Dev’t Competition

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will utilize a customized virtual testbed system in October to facilitate the final phase of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which will have a $2M grand prize.

Deployed in 2017, the Colosseum is comprised of 64 field programmable gate arrays and 128 two-antenna software-defined radios that work to help the platform simulate over 65K channel interactions from 256 wireless devices, DARPA said Monday.

The tool will host scrimmages and competitive matches in the development of radio frequencies during the Mobile World Congress 2019 Los Angeles event.

Colosseum is slated to be transferred to Northeastern University from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory after MWC19 as part of the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Wireless Research initiative.

“We are thrilled to see the Colosseum live on as a critical testbed for national research and development, providing academic institutions, defense labs, federally funded R&D centers, and industry with a means of exploring at-scale, proof-of-concept ideas to improve current and future generations of wireless technologies,” said Paul Tilghman, a program manager at DARPA.