The Wireless Innovation Forum Announces Annual Award Finalists

Dec. 13, 2012 - PRLog -- Washington, D.C. -- The Wireless Innovation Forum (www.WirelessInnovation.org), today announced finalists of their annual Achievement Awards. Finalists in the Technology of the Year include Thales and Weightless. Finalists for International Achievement are Dr. Jeffrey Reed and William Webb. Winners will be announced at Wireless Innovation Forum Conference on Communications Technologies and Software Defined Radio (SDR - WInnComm 2013). The premier event for the reconfigurable radio community, SDR-WInnComm will be held 8-11 January in Washington, D.C. Each day of this conference will feature keynotes by industry leaders as well as workshops, tutorials, and technical presentations. The event also touts an exposition and a technology showcase.

The Technology of the Year award is presented to an individual or organization for a breakthrough product or technology in the field of Software Defined or Cognitive Radio as selected by the members. Nomination summaries for the finalists are:

·         Weightless

Weightless is a proprietary, royalty-free, open standard for wireless machine-to-machine communications using TV white-space spectrum. The use of white-space spectrum, together with the unique characteristics of M2M traffic compared to human traffic means that the use of existing standards is far from optimal. The Weightless standard is optimised for this specific scenario and provides TDD operation with a wide range of provided data rates depending on the application, range and operating environment. The standard was designed to minimise cost and power consumption, featuring a chipset cost of less than USD$2, a range of up to 10km and a battery life of 10 years.

·         Thales SDR Networking Lab

Thales, a key player in software-defined radio (SDR), has announced the first deliveries of its SDR Networking Lab solution, which enables customers to develop and adapt their own SDR-standard waveforms and integrate them with SDR platforms. The SDR Networking Lab is a complete set of tools and solutions that let users define, develop and adapt new generations of waveforms with high-data-rate and network-centric capabilities. These waveforms can subsequently be ported to SDR systems compliant with the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) international standard. With the shift to network-centric operations, the SDR Networking Lab gives national armed forces and regional defence organisations the ability to develop their own network waveforms to meet their specific operational requirements, with guaranteed joint and combined forces and international interoperability. The SDR Networking Lab is based on two complementary tools: Com Lab, which uses advanced simulation to help users specify the system and network characteristics of tactical communication systems for forces in the field, as well as their operational benefits. · Waveform Lab, which supports the development, transfer and integration of waveforms on a wide range of SDR platforms, in compliance with the SCA standard (such as the FlexNet-One platform). Thales is involved in the European Secure Software Defined Radio (ESSOR) programme and is an active contributing member of the Wireless Innovation Forum.

The Forum International Achievement Award is presented to an individual, group of individuals, or organization that made especially significant contributions to international furtherance or acceptance of Software Defined or Cognitive Radio. The finalists in this category are:

·         Jeffrey Reed

Dr. Jeffrey Reed and his colleagues and students at Wireless@Virginia Tech have been instrumental in leading the way for research and academic collaboration in the areas of SDR and CR. The impact on the community has been tremendous, including multiple companies in the industry founded by VT graduates. VT has also hosted the Software Defined Radio Design Challenge in collaboration with the Wireless Innovation Forum to provide a challenging academic exercise for grad and undergrads in the area of SDR and CR. The contribution of Wireless@Virginia Tech has been extremely rich and fruitful over the years.

·         William Webb

Since 2003, William Webb has been a key figure in shaping spectrum policy across Europe through his work at Ofcom, the UK Communications regulator. As Director of Technology Resources, William managed Ofcom research and development and led a number of key policy initiatives including the Spectrum Framework Review, the development of Spectrum Usage Rights and most recently cognitive or white space policy. In January 2011, he became CTO of Neul, a Cambridge-based company focusing on machine-to-machine communications using TV white-space spectrum and producer of the first radios to fully meet the FCC white space radio specification. William has published eleven books, eighty papers, and four patents. He is a Visiting Professor at Surrey University and DeMontfort University and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the IEEE and the IET where he is a Vice President.

Attracting investors, commercial network operators, radio manufacturers, system integrators, government procurement officials, regulators, engineering service providers and consultants from over 22 different countries, SDR-WInnComm is the only event devoted to the advancement of reconfigurable radio technologies from research through deployment. Additional information on the SDR-WInnComm program, workshops and tutorials can be found at http://groups.WInnForum.org/SDR-WInnComm-2013.  

Winners in each of these categories will be announced at the Welcome Reception, sponsored by General Dynamics C4 Systems, held Tuesday, 8 January.

To register, visit our registration page.

Program updates can be followed on our program page, as well as our Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Platinum Sponsors include General Dynamics C4 Systems, Harris Corporation, Indra Sistemas, Objective Interface Systems, and Selex Elsag. Pentek and General Dynamics C4 Systems are the event’s Gold Sponsors.