NI Provides SDR Technology for DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

National Instruments (NI), a provider of platform-based systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve engineering challenges, has announced a collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to supply core infrastructure for a channel emulation testbed, called Colosseum, which will play a central role in the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.

NI will provide USRP software defined radios (SDRs) that support a wide variety of open source and proprietary tool flows including GNU Radio, RFNoC and LabVIEW system design software.

The Colosseum channel emulation testbed supports up to 256-by-256-channel, real-time channel emulation, calculating more than 65,000 channel interactions at up to 80 MHz of real-time bandwidth per channel. The testbed will be housed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and will be accessible remotely for next-generation wireless research. The testbed will provide a level playing field for the three-year competition with winning teams vying for a total of $3.75M in prize money from DARPA.