In two years, the world may see a revolutionary solution to the century-old approach of allocating bands for specific use on the radio frequency spectrum. Vanderbilt may help solve the problem.

A Vanderbilt team of researchers and alumni – dubbed MarmotE – won the Round 1 in mid-December of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), leading the top 10 teams, each awarded $750,000 in prize money. This was the first event of the three-year long tournament. Round 2 is set for December 2018. The ultimate SC2 winners will walk away in 2019 with $2 million in prize money.

The win is especially significant for Peter Volgyesi, a research scientist and Miklos Maroti, a research associate professor at Vanderbilt’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems. More than a year ago, the ISIS team qualified for SC2 but was not one of the five teams funded by DARPA for the competition. Volgyesi and Maroti worked only in their spare time, across months of development and hundreds of scrimmage hours. “This win means a great deal to us,” Volgyesi said. “The competitors – both funded and unfunded – represent the best defense contractors, private companies and academic groups in mobile networking globally.”  Read More

Research scientist Peter Volgyesi (left)
and Miklos Maroti, a research associate
professor at Vanderbilt’s Institute for
Software Integrated Systems.