Team from IIT Bombay with Prof. U.B. Desai as Mentor won theMicrosoft Innovation Award of the IEEE Computer Society’s International Design Competition 2001 IIT Bombay receives Microsoft Innovation Award at IEEE CSIDC 2001 The finals for Second Annual Computer Society’s International Design Competion 2001 (CSIDC 2001) were held at Washington DC on the 24th and 25th of June. The goal of CSIDC is to advance excellence in education by having student teams design and implement computer-based solutions to real-world problems. This year’s CSIDC was focused on Bluetooth wireless technology.
The competition was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, seventy five teams from over the world were selected for participation and project kits were provided to design any useful and innovative products they could think of. In the second stage, ten of these teams were selected for the finals.
Further, an Innovation award was started this year to promote new and original ideas, through support from Microsoft. The IIT Bombay team won the Innovation award.
An abstract of IIT Bombay’s project:
“Air passengers are required by law to switch off their mobile phones on board any flight. This requirement has been imposed due to two reasons. First, signals emitted by the mobile phone interfere with Air Traffic Control (ATC) signals, undermining the safety of the flight. Second, a mobile at such an altitude connects to multiple base stations simultaneously, clogging the resources of the ground network. We have developed a novel solution based on the integration of diverse communication links: Bluetooth, Cellular Network (GSM/IS-95) , PSTN and Air-to-ground connection. Our solution enables the user to remain connected in-flight, while solving the above two critical issues. The switch over from the cellular network to our in-flight Bluetooth network does not require any user initiation or change of the mobile handset. Bluetooth, due to its low power, short range and fast frequency hopping presents negligible interference to ATC signals. We have implemented a Bluetooth enabled GSM phone, (on a laptop using a GSM modem and a Bluetooth kit), a Bluetooth Airplane Gateway and a Ground Switching Center (using a phone modem for connecting to the PSTN) required to demonstrate the prototype. The automatic setup up of various communication hops, call routing and transmission of voice over these links has been demonstrated. The system provides a unique and useful service and is perceived to be highly benefical to the society.
The IIT-Bombay team consisted of:
Aditya Dua
Aman Kansal
Arjunan R
Sumitra Ganesh
Vivek Raghunathan
Mentor: Prof. U.B Desai