In 2014, 15 teams from around the United States participated in the final event of the DARPA Spectrum Challenge, a competition designed to encourage development of programmable radios that can deliver high-priority transmissions in congested and contested spectrum environments.
This event tested conditions directly applicable to military communications and demonstrated that radios can learn to coexist and communicate reliably through autonomous sensing and adaptation paving the way for new spectrum-sharing applications for the Department of Defense and commercial industry. The final event took place at DARPAs offices in Arlington, Va.
After two intense days of competition in which competitors alternately battled for control of the spectrum and worked together to share the spectrum teams from Tennessee Technological University and Georgia Tech Research Institute and an independent group that had entered the competition emerged as the overall winners, earning a total of $150,000 in prize money.
