Spectrum Wars — Gamification of dynamic spectrum access and cognitive radio

Spectrum Wars is an interactive Dynamic Spectrum Access game for up to 4 players. Two teams compete using Iris software radios to transmit as much data as possible over a single wireless link using a common spectrum band. Each team consists of a transmitter and a receiver and players use a graphical interface to control the parameters of their radios. In creating and maintaining the wireless link, players must contend with interference from the opposing team. Additional transmitters acting as primary users create further interference and provide a highly dynamic environment where players must react and adapt to avoid losing connectivity. A display node observes the spectrum band and provides a large graphical display, showing all active transmissions in the band via a power spectral density view as well as a waterfall display showing the time-varying nature of the activity in the band. The graphical display also shows the instantaneous carrier frequency and bandwidth of each team´s receiver and scoring charts indicating how much data has been successfully transferred by each team. The first team to successfully transfer a fixed number of data packets wins. The interactive, hands-on nature of Spectrum Wars provides an opportunity for players to quickly learn about the challenges of rendezvous and synchronization in a dynamic spectrum access scenario. Teams can experiment with different interference avoidance strategies and can choose to compete aggressively by causing as much interference as possible for their opponents or to cooperate by avoiding the transmissions of other users.