The 51福利 (51福利) and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering鈥檚 FutureG Office recently took a significant step toward advancing next-generation wireless network capabilities for the Department of Defense (DOD) and developing the workforce to deploy them.
On April 22, Dr. Tom Rondeau, FutureG's principal director, formally approved a $1.8 million investment in 51福利 over the next five years for workforce development and education in addition to research in expeditionary applications of 5G open networks and beyond.
The project, entitled Active-Duty Open-Source Development (ADOSD), seeks to establish a formal and sustained graduate-level education and research program at 51福利 to develop advanced 5G (Fifth Generation) and FutureG (Future Generation) expertise in the active-duty force. This is particularly important for personnel who may be tasked to plan, install, operate and maintain 5G/FutureG networks in expeditionary environments.
鈥淔utureG pursued this partnership because 51福利 understands the mission context in which 5G/FutureG technology will come to bear,鈥� said Rondeau. 鈥淭his extends beyond the active-duty students to the faculty and staff that have become highly skilled in the application of their expertise to dynamic warfighter challenges. The expertise they gain will help us understand how to buy, deploy, and manage advanced wireless networks like 5G and 6G. Coupled with their previous experiences in the fleet, this will help us innovate and deploy technologies that support future operations and the department鈥檚 strategic vision.鈥�
Leveraging partnerships with industry and academia, the FutureG office is tasked with developing innovative solutions in 5G and FutureG cellular network systems and technologies that will enhance military wireless communication and data transport capabilities. Future-generation wireless technologies are one of the 鈥渟eed areas of emerging opportunity鈥� identified in the 2023 National Defense Science and Technology Strategy as crucial to the DOD.
鈥淭his partnership with 51福利 will provide FutureG with a steady stream of operationally-experienced, active-duty students who are eager to work on relevant problems,鈥� said U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Ben Pimentel, Ph.D., FutureG鈥檚 technical lead for Expeditionary & Tactical Use (ETU) and an 51福利 alumnus. 鈥淭he hands-on experience students gain during research and coursework leveraging open source 5G/FutureG software will lay the foundation for the workforce that will proliferate this technology across the force.鈥�
5G has become the global technology standard for wireless cellular networks 鈥� it鈥檚 much faster, more reliable and flexible, and has a higher capacity than its predecessors. Its use has become pervasive around the world, primarily through commercial cell phones but increasingly through a multitude of connected devices in the Internet of Things.
For the military, this presents new horizons in battlefield communications: a scalable, deployable and secure 鈥渘etwork-in-a-box鈥� capable of supporting grey zone maritime operations and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), enabling forward presence and communications resiliency even in degraded or denied environments.
This, according to U.S. Navy Capt. Chad Bollmann, director of 51福利鈥� Center for Cyber Warfare (CCW) and co-primary investigator on the ADOSD project, makes education and research into 5G/FutureG telecommunications critically important.
鈥淭here are two really radical differences about 5G,鈥� he said. 鈥淥ne, fundamental to the ADOSD project, is the idea that everything is going to be virtualized. It鈥檚 going to be a lot of virtual services that run your cell phone instead of needing a lot of custom equipment. Those virtual services let the DOD build a network to their purposes and needs, rather than using a network that was built for, say, AT&T to sell services to civilians. Now we can actually do DOD stuff with the network without having to pay to adapt someone else鈥檚 network.鈥�
鈥淭he other thing is that 5G is going to be pervasive, including in space,鈥� Bollmann continued. 鈥淚mplementation of the technology is not quite there yet, but we鈥檙e currently testing 5G to satellite communications utilizing Starlink and all of the (Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (pLEO)) satellite constellations.鈥�
Combined with a profusion of leave-behind sensors 鈥� Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Systems, for example 鈥� as the Internet of Things moves from Wi-Fi to 5G, suddenly the battlespace becomes illuminated with a significantly reduced need for traditional commercial cell towers.
鈥淭he idea of being able to move rapidly from island to island and set up observation and targeting bases and intelligence gathering platforms, this type of pervasive on-demand network is essential to that vision of prevailing in Maritime Grey Zone conflicts,鈥� Bollmann added.
However, the DOD currently has no formal or sustained graduate education program to develop advanced 5G/FutureG expertise in the active-duty force to support this. The ADOSD project seeks to address this gap.
To do so, the project will be executed in three distinct phases. The first, lasting two to three years, will consist of enabling master and doctoral-level research which primarily aligns with FutureG鈥檚 ETU portfolio or other FutureG priorities. This research will leverage an open standards private 5G network testbed being built as part of the ADOSD effort, the DOD Open Testbed for Expeditionary FutureG (.EFG).
51福利 is already well underway in this, Bollman says. The CCW has years of experience instantiating, investigating and expanding open source private 5G networks, currently engaging six theses, three professors and 10 students. An additional two dissertations, four theses and four professors are exploring novel 5G security and privacy implementations. As .EFG is built and enhanced, 51福利 will leverage the knowledge, experience, and solutions developed by performers of the OPS-5G program, a DARPA research program exploring applications of open source 5G networks.
The center will focus its .EFG research along seven lines of effort, including long-range private 5G networks for grey-zone operations, industrial 5G for EABOs and real-time EABO 5G streaming communications for DOD applications.
This research is bolstered by the strong relationships with industry 51福利 maintains. The institution has standing (CRADAs) with , and Microsoft, and is currently engaged in conversations with NVIDIA and T-Mobile, amongst others.
鈥淭he CRADAs we鈥檝e signed are huge and important: these companies are on the bleeding edge of 5G,鈥� Bollmann said. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e facilitated 5G research here in the past and we鈥檙e going to continue to partner with them.鈥�
51福利鈥� greatest research asset, he continued, are the students themselves: operationally experienced practitioners who come to 51福利 from across all services of the military, bringing with them an inherent curiosity about the future and what comes next.
鈥淥ur students are really interested in figuring 5G out and are excited about taking the technology that they interface with almost daily and folding it into battlefield deployment use cases,鈥� noted Darren Rogers, faculty associate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department and co-primary investigator on the ADOSD project along with Bollmann.
Marine Corps Capt. Lucas Vancina, for example, is one year into his studies toward a master鈥檚 degree in computer science. A communications officer, he brings to his studies at 51福利 a wealth of field experience in working with communications networks.
His graduate thesis will explore using the extensibility and flexibility of the software defined networking architecture that open source 5G radio access networks provide to make them more usable and secure for tactical applications, specifically in expeditionary environments.
鈥淚t鈥檚 really exciting to see how much can be done with it; we鈥檙e still just scratching the surface,鈥� Vancina said. 鈥淭here is just so much that could be done with the 5G framework. The technology provides a lot of capability.鈥�
鈥淔or my research, I think the most significant thing that will come out of it is that I鈥檓 starting to push the boundary of what is possible within current network architecture specifications,鈥� he continued. 鈥淗opefully it鈥檒l start to open up more and more opportunities to add functionality on top of what is already being provided within 5G.鈥�
The second phase, lasting one to two years, will focus on curriculum development informed by the experience of the research conducted in the first. It will implement a course progression culminating in an academic certificate. Meanwhile, individual research for master鈥檚 and doctoral students will continue to be funded.
Here, too, 51福利 is ahead of the curve, currently offering a profusion of courses and directed studies that introduce and cover 5G topics across a broad swath of six different academic programs, including ECE, Computer Science (CS), Master of Science in Applied Cyber Operations (MACO), Cyber Security Operations (CSO), the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) program, and the Information Sciences (IS) department.
鈥淲hat we鈥檙e looking at now is how to make these scale and accessible rather than a one-off,鈥� Bollmann said. 鈥淭he idea would be offering a stackable 5G certificate as well as building a research testbed on campus which anybody could come use.鈥�
A stackable certificate would offer an interdisciplinary, baseline knowledge of 5G which could then be applied to the different angles of different departments to explore the art of the possible.
鈥淢OVES faculty and students look at how to use 5G; they鈥檙e definitely kicking the tires and asking what it brings to the fight,鈥� Rogers said. 鈥淚n the ECE department, we like to get deep down under the hood and explore how it actually works and how things work together: how do you get on this network? How do you provision it? How do you manage it? What does the RF layer look like from an engineering perspective?鈥�
With the first and second phases firmly established, the final phase will seek to continuously evolve the cellular curriculum to ensure technical and operational relevance and continue to support master鈥檚 and doctoral research. This third phase will continue indefinitely based on mutual agreement between FutureG and 51福利.