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Research and innovation

Horizon prize for collaborative spectrum sharing

What the prize was about, details of winners and finalists

The winner is announced

Five applications were competing to win the prize. A high-level expert group with independent top-class experts from science and academia in the area of spectrum technology evaluated the applications. The prize was awarded by Commissioner G.H. Oettinger on November 9th, 2016 during the 2nd Global 5G Event in Rome, Italy.

Finalists

Winner: DISTRIBUTE

The goal of this prize was to develop a radical solution to unblock the expected capacity crunch of wireless networks, by providing alternative and decentralised spectrum management approaches.

The €500,000 award for innovation in collaborative spectrum sharing went to a team led by the Centre for Telecommunications Research of King's College London (UK), whose DISTRIBUTE spectrum sharing solution could improve spectral efficiency by more than 30% in certain cases, like the sub-GHz frequency spectrum.

The winning team also included Turku University of Applied Sciences(FI), Queen Mary University of London (UK), Fairspectrum (FI) and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

This application presented a groundbreaking solution that distributes the database among the communicating wireless communication devices and network nodes—such that the database can be run without having to develop a new central entity. This is a highly novel approach that frees-up the infrastructure and functions, supporting spectrum sharing and improves spectral efficiency dramatically.