Al-enabled spectrum technology: What's next? - [Spectral Lines

Abstract

You've graduated from the school of spectral hard knocks, Paul Tilghman, a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program manager, told the teams competing in DARPA's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) finale on 23 October. The three-year competition had just concluded. ¶ Hard knocks wasn't an exaggeration—the 10 teams that made it to the finale, as well as others who were eliminated in earlier rounds of the competition, had been tasked with doing something that had never been done before. Their challenge was to see if AI-managed radio systems could work together to share wireless spectrum more effectively than static, preallocated bands. They had spent three years battling it out in matchups in Colosseum, an RF emulator that DARPA built specially for the competition.¶ By the end, the top teams had demonstrated that their systems could transmit more data over less spectrum than is possible using existing standards like LTE; they also showed an impressive ability to reuse spectrum over multiple radios. In some matchups, the radio systems of five teams were transmitting 200 or 300 percent more data than is possible with today's rigid spectrum band allocations. And that's important, given that we're facing a looming wireless-spectrum crunch. _ But, as Tilghman also stressed during SC2, when a DARPA Grand Challenge ends, it doesn't mean the technology is ready to go to market. These challenges are more about proving that a new technological idea is possible. So the contest showed that AI-controlled radios can work together to share spectrum among themselves, and pack more data into a given amount of spectrum. But where does the technology go from here, now that the DARPA challenge is finished?