The
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has released information
concerning its innovative challenge to help alleviate the
electromagnetic spectrum.
The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, announced in March
with an eye toward ensuring military and civilian wireless devices will
have unfettered access to the increasingly crowded and finite
electromagnetic spectrum, will involve three year-long phases that begin
in 2017. Teams that make it past the two preliminary events will mark
the culmination of a championship event in 2019. A grand prize of $2
million is up for grabs for the team with the best software-defined
radio solution that collaborates most effectively with a diversity of
simultaneously operating radios in a manner that optimizes spectrum
usage for the entire communicating ensemble, DARPA said in a release. Second place will walk away with $1 million and third $750,000.
The
spectrum is finite, and many have been concerned that with
the increasing amount of devices being introduced both in the military
and civilian space, there will not be enough room for the government to
perform essential tasks, such as national security, that rely on the
EMS. “What I worry about right now is that the private demand for
spectrum is going to exceed our ability to keep pace. We could, if we’re
not careful, put some national systems at risk,” DoD CIO Terry
Halvorsen told Congress in March.
“We
want to radically accelerate the development of machine-learning
technologies and strategies that will allow on-the-fly sharing of
spectrum at machine timescales,” said Paul Tilghman, program manager for
SC2.
DARPA released a pair of broad agency announcements on the
FedBizOpps contracting website July 19 that outline program
participation and information. The first notes two tracks participants
can enter; participants in the proposal track will enter into a funded
contract with DARPA while the open track will welcome a wide range of
participants such as commercial companies, startups, universities, or
even hackers, most of which have not partnered with DARPA previously.
Teams in the open track must pass entrance hurdles demonstrating skills
in software-defined radio and artificial intelligence techniques to
secure a spot in the challenge. DARPA noted that participants in each
track will be treated identically.
The second notice provides
details on architectural needs for the completion that include scoring
methodology, scenario development testing competitors’ collaborative
strategies and tactics.
“I am very excited about agile spectral
use in the future and ways we can start to think about the technologies
that will help shift not just the military sector but maybe on someday
the commercial sector to be much more efficient users of spectrum,”
Stephen Welby, assistant secretary of defense for research and
engineering, told Congress in April.
Welby also expressed his
excitement for DARPA’s effort in this space referencing the challenge.
“I am enormously excited about the initiatives that DARPA has started
here in the last two weeks to set up prizes associated with very novel
use of the spectrum … to think about new ways that we can architect our
commercial and military systems to be really efficient users locally,
regionally and globally to make the most use of the spectrum we have.”
Spectrum
operations have become so critical for DoD that leadership has
considered making it the 6th operational domain of warfare along with
air, land, sea, space, and most recently, cyber. Breaking Defense reported
late last year that Halvorsen’s office will be “’the Departmental lead
for these efforts’ to explore a wide range of policy options for the
electromagnetic spectrum, ‘to include the potential recognition of the
EMS as a domain.’”
Noting that the spectrum must be auctioned off
and shared with civilian partners, Maj Gen Sandra Finan, deputy CIO, C4
and information infrastructure, capabilities, at the Pentagon, echoed
the sentiments of many that the department must be adaptive in its
spectrum use. She also seconded Halvorsen that EMS should be an
operational domain.
“I think that spectrum operations are so
important that we ought to look at declaring the Electromagnetic
Spectrum a domain because we are going to be operating offensively and
defensively across that domain,” she said at the AFCEA Defensive Cyber
Operations Symposium in Washington in April. “So I think that’s one of
the most important things that we can see in the future.”
DARPA
said it has also posted a special notice with details on competitor
information as well as proposers days in August to answer questions of
potential participants.
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