The upcoming RPP will be for the open centralized unit distributed unit (OCUDU) project.

“What Linux did for breaking open the internet and what Kubernetes did for allowing us access to cloud, we need to have the same kind of transformative technology for wireless communications,” Tom Rondeau, head of the Pentagon’s FutureG Office, said Thursday at the AITalks conference, presented by AIScoop.

“As wireless communications 5G is advancing, it is becoming a key part of the solution to future technologies. [As] future AI- and ML-based technologies are integrated with the network, how do we get that data from the edge and how do we understand the world around us? How do we pull that back? All that has to be opened up so that the innovation cycles will continue,” he said.

Rondeau noted that the DOD wants to work with the commercial sector as it looks to meet its own niche needs.

“How do we actually program these systems? How do we actually access the internals of them? And how do we advance and innovate rapidly to meet those rapid changes in the battlefield conditions today? We need to open up these systems, break them open,” he said.

The OCUDU project aims to deliver defense-unique capabilities on a “commercially sustainable” platform, according to Rondeau’s slide presentation. The aim is to reduce acquisition costs and push new capabilities to the field.

The Pentagon wants systems that are secure, resilient, AI-driven, ubiquitous, interoperable, cost-effective, customizable and “transparent.”

The FutureG Office is partnering with the National Spectrum Consortium to host an industry day, slated for May 7, to brief vendors on the OCUDU effort, according to Rondeau.

Officials want to “make sure that the entire industry knows what we’re doing here, why we’re doing it, why we think this provides that secure, robust, cost-effective, innovation solution for using 6G technologies in the battlefield,” Rondeau said.

A request for prototype proposals will likely come out in June, he said, and an award is estimated for the August-September time frame.

“What we’re really going for here is a carrier-grade cellular solution that is based on open-source technologies. We’re going to get that started and rolling in the next fiscal year, and that’s going to be a major effort that we’re going to be pursuing across the Defense Department and with commercial industry. We’re going to set this up for future commercial success so we can continue to take advantage” of those capabilities, Rondeau said.

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In December 2024, the DOD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer published a solicitation for the Advanced Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Demonstration, which called for industry technology that could allow the Pentagon and private sector to simultaneously use the same spectrum band. The department is currently evaluating proposals for source selection and intends to conduct the demonstration in November 2025, Tom Rondeau, principal director for the FutureG office, said Wednesday.

“We’re focused on the lower 3 GHz band. … It is a very difficult band for DOD. We have dozens of types of systems — hundreds of systems total — that operate in that lower 3 Ghz band,” Rondeau said during a panel at the Apex Defense Conference. “How do we share that? How can we do that with commercial success? Because that is important too, … but we can’t do it at the cost of national security.”

The demonstration comes following years of back-and-forth between the Defense Department and the commercial telecommunications industry over access to the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band used by the Pentagon to operate different radars, weapons and other electronic systems. However, the telecom industry wants part of that spectrum to meet rising demand for commercial and civil 5G wireless technology.

While the debate over spectrum access has been going on for decades, lawmakers and Pentagon officials have recently expressed concerns that auctioning off parts of the spectrum to industry could hamper President Donald Trump’s homeland missile defense project known as Golden Dome.

After a congressionally mandated study determined that it’s possible for the Pentagon and industry to share the lower 3 GHz band of the spectrum, the Biden administration’s 2023 National Spectrum Strategy called for additional analysis into dynamic spectrum-sharing operations. 

According to the department’s RFP for this year’s demonstration, the results of the event will help inform the follow-on study requested by the National Spectrum Strategy.

“The goal of this effort is to show how advancements in one or more of the key spectrum-sharing enablers can achieve the overall objective of proving the viability of spectrum sharing in the 3100-3450 MHz band,” the RFP stated.

The experiment will be coordinated in partnership between the Pentagon and the National Spectrum Consortium, which represents hundreds of industry and academia organizations working on spectrum-related issues, as well as other federal agencies.

The department has conducted a number of experiments on dynamic spectrum-sharing operations in the past, but Rondeau noted that the November demonstration will be the first of its kind in terms of size and scale.

“The real gap that we’ve had in these past spectrum-sharing projects has been scale. They’ve been, frankly, under-resourced concepts on a table, maybe in a lab, maybe one or two outdoor experiments here and there. But nothing at this scale, which is a large-scale, multi-domain spectrum-sharing demonstration,” he said.

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The office, which is in charge of research-and-development efforts for advanced wireless network capabilities, has three projects underway in its “Beyond 5G” portfolio that it plans to carry out through at least fiscal 2025. Collectively, the programs aim to enhance the Pentagon’s ability to connect and maneuver within the electromagnetic spectrum, Tom Rondeau, principal director for FutureG at the Pentagon, told DefenseScoop.

“We have more readily available access to spectrum than we ever have, and it keeps increasing. So our ability to maneuver within the spectrum from a single system keeps advancing,” Rondeau said in a recent interview on the sidelines of NDIA’s Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference and Exhibition.

Future generations of wireless communications will use higher frequencies on the spectrum than their predecessors, therefore providing faster connections with lower latency compared to 5G and others. The tech is also expected to be highly scalable, allowing for devices to use multiple connections simultaneously — meaning they can stay online even if one network source is interrupted or interfered with.

The Beyond 5G portfolio largely focuses on R&D to leverage these advancements for military applications. The Office of the Secretary of Defense requested $55.1 million in fiscal 2024 to fund the portfolio’s work — including the three applied research projects.

One of those efforts is to develop a Unlimited Software-defined Radio that isn’t bound by hardware and previous generations’ architecture and implementation constraints. The capability will let users leverage any part of the spectrum with any waveform, improving overall spectrum management capabilities, Rondeau said.

“Spectrum is a maneuver space, and so we need to be able to take advantage of that,” he said. “We still think of spectrum and warfighting in terms of, ‘What channel are you on?’ … We really need to be flexible and maneuverable around all these.”

Once warfighters have access to more spectrum, they’ll need to easily navigate the network without worrying about whether or not they’re on the right communications channel. Rondeau explained that another research project — Hyper-dimensional Software-defined Networks — will enable autonomous optimization of wireless network operations to solve the problem.

“The network needs to tell the system what to do,” he said, adding that the technology will “be able to understand not what your radio needs to do, but what everyone needs to do. And so, how do I look across this from the different physical access that we have, the geometries of where you’re at?”

It’s a multidimensional problem that requires the FutureG office to consider how both terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks can optimize across several domains at once, he noted. 

Speaking during a panel discussion at the NDIA conference, Rondeau emphasized that non-terrestrial networks — including satellite constellations and airborne platforms — are key to providing warfighters with ubiquitous, secure and instant communications in austere environments.

“It’s not just satellite constellations, it’s not just the proliferated [low-Earth orbit] concepts — it’s all the layers above us,” Rondeau said. “It can be [unmanned aerial vehicles] enabling these systems, or high-altitude platforms and balloons that might be able to be subset systems to pLEO all the way up to [geosynchronous orbit] as part of our hybrid access to infrastructure.”

The third research project underway at the FutureG office is development of Mobile Internet Protocol advancements so that new systems can integrate with the rest of the network, Rondeau told DefenseScoop.

Traditional internet protocols were created for legacy devices that are designed to be plugged into fixed sites, such as computers. Even mobile phones that roam across coverage areas are connected to a centralized cellular network that works to manage how a device stays connected, he explained.

Therefore, the FutureG office is trying to understand “the next generation of internet protocol that is fundamentally rooted in mobility,” as well as how it should be managed, Rondeau said.

Overall, the three projects represent a hard engineering and technical problem for the FutureG office, especially as it looks to scale capabilities across the entire Defense Department.

“When you’re talking about what waveform to use, what frequency to use [and] power consumption, … if you’re trying to optimize all these simultaneously, they’re actually competing goals,” he explained. “Then, as you’re trying to do this across multiple — maybe hundreds of thousands — of radio systems in the future, all operating in the battlefield, now you’re trying to schedule who gets what, when, what resources go to what place and all these things.”

Another challenge is the unstable fiscal environment that has plagued the Defense Department and other federal agencies in recent years, in addition to a lack of transparency from the White House and Congress regarding potential funding cuts, he said. Uncertainty in the budgetary decisions could lead the FutureG office into a more conservative approach to how it spends money, which in turn could stifle the advancement and delivery of new technologies, he added.

In OSD’s budget request for FY ’25, the Beyond 5G portfolio would receive $38.5 million — $16.6 million less than the previous year’s request. According to budget documents, the decrease was due to “a directed reduction that was applied to meet DOD overall funding benchmarks.” 

If approved by lawmakers, the 2025 funding would go towards continued development of the office’s ongoing programs, as well as adding new projects focused on contested logistics, open-source software solutions and multi-site FutureG experimentation, the documents stated.

“If they’re going to cut my budget, then tell me about it. Don’t surprise us. And if it’s a non-starter to crawl back the budget, at least I’ve got time to properly plan,” Rondeau said. “It’s that level of uncertainty that prevents us from really creating a space for the innovation that I need.”

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The FutureG office at the Pentagon has been working to expand the scale of previous efforts to research and test 5G and future-generation wireless network capabilities. As the office eyes 5G deployment, Tom Rondeau, principal director for FutureG at the Pentagon, emphasized that taking capabilities developed through research-and-development efforts and conducting live experiments is key to successful implementation.

“It’s all about the reps and the experience of getting this stuff out of the lab and into the real world, understanding the limitations, understanding the difficulties of these radio systems,” Rondeau told DefenseScoop on Wednesday during an interview at NDIA’s Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference and Exhibition.

The Pentagon has held a number of next-generation communications experiments in the past. In 2020, the department awarded contracts to multiple vendors to set up 5G and FutureG testbed projects at different military bases across the U.S., each of which evaluated a different way warfighters can leverage the technology, such as with smart warehouses and spectrum sharing.

The office also established open radio access network (O-RAN) technology pilots in 2023 at other installations, with the goal of working with companies to understand how to implement open networks and open software approaches to wireless communications.

By the end of this year, Rondeau said the FutureG office has plans to add 5G capabilities on force protection surveillance towers at three bases in the U.S. Africa Command located in eastern Africa. Made by defense tech company Anduril and funded by the Pentagon, the towers were built using tactical radios and don’t have inherent 5G capability, meaning they have lower data rates, resolution and frame rates, he noted.

Speaking of the collaboration, Rondeau said: “That was working with Anduril and saying, ‘This is why it’s important to go 5G because of these additional features.’”

“Over the past year, we’ve actually been funding the performers to upgrade them to where we now have high-definition video at high frame rates coming through,” he added. “This can be the difference between identifying somebody holding a baby and holding an AK-47.”

The standalone, self-powered towers provide full-peripheral coverage of the bases, and AFRICOM will also soon be deploying an unmanned aerial vehicle to extend the range of their situational awareness beyond the fixed site, Rondeau said.

The FutureG office will also be involved in a multinational 5G experiment at Camp Adazi in Latvia with NATO partners this fall, Rondeau said. One of the largest ranges in the Baltics, Adazi has already been upgraded with 5G technologies by the Latvia Mobile Telecom to test the technology for military applications, and thereby advancing the overall market for 5G, he explained.

“We’ve now got Latvia, Estonia, U.S. forces of course, Spain, Norway and Sweden — as well as the Michigan Air National Guard — that are all part of this experiment we’re going to be conducting,” Rondeau said. “Let’s take this stuff into the real world. Let’s take it into a range where there’s kinetic operations that are happening all around there. That’s going to teach us a lot about the value proposition of these technologies,”

He added that the experiment should result in “a miniature version” of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2). The Pentagon-wide initiative looks to connect data streams from across U.S. military services and international allies and partners to enable better and faster decision-making.

Although it’s not directly involved in the effort right now, the FutureG office still talks to department officials leading CJADC2 intermittently, Rondeau said.

“Working with NATO and with the Joint Staff on this, we’re showing that interoperability at the network layer is done,” he noted. “With 5G as the core network, with high-capacity and improved security features that we’ve been working on, all of that is now possible.”

The goal for forthcoming exercises will be providing interoperability at the data layer and ensuring that stakeholders are integrating with the new data layers developed by the Joint Staff and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, he added.

Updated on Aug. 22, 2024, at 3:55 PM: This story has been updated to remove a confusing reference to the FutureG office’s relationship to the Pentagon’s Chief Information Officer.

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In recent years, the Pentagon has awarded contracts and rolled out test beds for 5G and other next-generation capabilities. CIO John Sherman has said he’s particularly interested in scaling these efforts to include O-RAN technology pilots at additional installations.

O-RAN enables open interfaces, interoperable components and multi-vendor solutions for wireless networks. Tom Rondeau, principal director for FutureG and 5G in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, is an advocate of this approach.

“Just want to kind of come out and say that we are … in DOD, all-in on O-RAN or open RAN,” he said this week at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council.

The military services are experimenting with the technology, he noted.

“The Marine Corps this week is kind of finishing up one of their latest spirals of the OSIRIS platform that Lockheed Martin is the prime on, out in Camp Pendleton. So we’ll be getting a lot of good data on an actual open RAN architecture that is designed for Marine Corps expeditionary advanced base operations uses. So I’m really looking forward to getting the feedback on that one … That’s part of the partnership that we’ve created to advance the open RAN concept,” he said.

In August, Lockheed Martin announced that it had delivered a prototype 5G testbed variant for an OSIRIS, or Open Systems Interoperable and Reconfigurable Infrastructure Solution, capability to the Marines at Camp Pendleton, California, to begin mobile network experimentation.

The prototype integrates an open radio unit with Lockheed’s hybrid base station running Intel’s FlexRAN reference software and hardware, according to the company.

“This integration makes the OSIRIS system one of the first tactical 5G standalone small cell systems compliant with the Open-Radio Access Network (O-RAN) 7.2 split architecture,” the contractor said in a release. “O-RAN 7.2 split architecture compliance optimizes the OSIRIS system to oversee increases in bandwidth while also maximizing virtualization of shared resources like radios.”

Whitney McNamara, a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, said there are some things the U.S. can do to get a leg up in its communications technology competition with China.

“I think one is just making sure that we are incentivizing all of industry to have this open RAN approach … that allows vendors to be interoperable and that allows us to innovate on sort of the 5G tech stack. I think that allows us to harness all the great commercial innovation that we see in industry. And two, it’s an advantage against [Chinese telecom giant] Huawei that’s very much vertically integrated, so when they want to innovate, they have to replace the whole system,” she said.

McNamara has a Pentagon background, having previously served as director of science and technology for the DOD’s Defense Innovation Board and as an emerging tech subject matter expert in the CIO’s office.

Industry is facing challenges, she noted.

“Currently, we have some bottlenecks, I would argue, in O-RAN adoption in the U.S., especially among smaller firms,” she said. “I think making sure that the O-RAN infrastructure and tests and evaluation facilities to make sure that they can get certified, that they are interoperable with O-RAN, that they are secure is really, really critical.”

Open RAN architectures can help promote industry competition, according to Dan Rice, vice president of 5G.MIL programs at Lockheed Martin.

“I think the advantage of those open RAN standards … are that smaller businesses can compete on just a portion of that stack. You don’t have to try to have all the capital and the investment necessary to deliver an end-to-end solution. You can choose what part of that ecosystem you want to compete in. And with the interoperability and the ability to test that against standards … you’re able to then show how that can be delivered into any O-RAN infrastructure,” he said.

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