DySPAN Spectrum Challenge: Situational Awareness and Opportunistic Spectrum Access Benchmarked

In this paper, we describe the original problem statement and the two winning solutions to the IEEE DySPAN Challenge, organized in Baltimore in 2017. The idea of the challenge was to invite teams to propose as diverse as possible solutions to a well defined problem, and evaluate the performance of the proposed solutions in a realistic environment. The challenge is defined to enable benchmarking and comparison of multiple teams, possibly working on different parts of the system, in a real environment. The winning solutions represented a complete and working system, working robustly and adapting to both anticipated scenario changes, as well as random effects caused by the conference setting. The code for running the challenge along with the winning solutions is publicly available, so that interested teams can start from the code when designing or benchmarking solutions, as well as when setting up own challenges and competitions. As a result, the challenge can serve as a milestone toward the creation of a benchmarking series. This paper contains all the necessary details about the software repositories so that it becomes possible to rerun the challenge and start building novel solutions based on the winners in IEEE DySPAN 2017.