Mason Team Wins Prestigious Franz Edelman Award for Work with FCC

thing similar before, but they had to modify the software on the car’s devices, which makes integration into existing networks diffcult.”

Eventually, their system might be useful for military vehicles, airplanes, and driverless cars. “Driverless vehicles are going to be connected to the internet, and in theory, a hacker might be able to hack into thousands of vehicles at the same time,” Davidson says. “We always want to be a step ahead of potential threats.”

––Nanci Hellmich

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Mason Team Wins Prestigious Franz Edelman Award for Work with FCC

If we want driverless cars, drones, and new medical technologies, if we want the Internet of Things, Mason systems engineering and operations research professor Karla Hoffman says the electromagnetic spectrum must be repurposed.

To do that, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently repurposed 84 megahertz of low-frequency spectrum. It did this by purchasing spectrum from the nation’s television broadcasters and auctioning that spectrum to wireless providers. Television stations remaining on the air were reassigned channels within a smaller TV band.

Developing the optimization software and analytics both for the auction and to place 2,990 television stations in the United States and Canada on channels that allow them to reach the same number of viewers was the job of a nine-person team with deep Mason roots, mostly handpicked by Hoffman.

The four-year project was so successful that the FCC team received the 2018 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The $10,000 award, the most prestigious in the feld, is given annually by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

“It was my dream project with my dream team,” says Hoffman, whose FCC experience and reputation as a leader in the feld of mathematical and statistical modeling positioned her and Mason to have a prominent role in the venture.

The spectrum auction brought in $20 billion, $7 billion of which went to reducing the federal defcit. Through operations research, and mathematical and computer science techniques, 78 percent of the television stations remained on their same channels after the auction.

“We were worried about all the stations,” Brian Smith, MS Operations Research ’15, says. “If they were moving to a new channel, would they still reach the same population they were broadcasting to before; would they interfere with each other and cause populations to not get their services?”

What to do?

First, Smith says, the physics of the individual television signals were modeled to determine whether stations operating on close to the same channels would interfere with each other. That data was processed into mathematical equations that, with the help of a lot of computer processing power, allowed the team to provide solutions that satisfed the FCC’s goals and overcame all interference constraints.

“We were so excited when the tools and models we developed outperformed all expectations,” Smith says.

––Damian Cristodero