NI, the provider of platform-based systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, announced a collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to supply core infrastructure for a path-breaking 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, based on the USRP X310 software defined radio and NI ATCA-3671 high-performance FPGA processing system, 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.

“The DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge brings together the greatest minds in cognitive radio and machine learning,” said Matt Ettus, distinguished engineer at NI and founder of Ettus Research. “The Colosseum testbed will allow those researchers to evaluate the performance of their designs to enable more reliable communications in many types of environments including the wireless conditions of a busy city neighborhood or in defense situations.”