On April 22, Dr. Tom Rondeau, Chief Director of FutureG, formally approved investing $1.8 million in the NPS over the next five years for workforce development and education, in addition to research into expeditionary applications such as 5G open networks.
The project, named Active-Duty Open-Source Development (ADOSD), aims to establish a formal, ongoing, graduate-level education and research program at NPS to develop advanced 5G (fifth generation) and FutureG (future generation) expertise among active duty forces, especially for personnel who may be tasked with planning, installing, operating and maintaining 5G/FutureG networks in expeditionary environments.
“FutureG pursued this partnership because NPS understands the mission contexts that 5G/FutureG technology will serve,” Rondeau said. “This extends beyond active-duty students to faculty who are highly skilled in applying their expertise to dynamic warfighter challenges. The expertise they gain will help them understand how to purchase, deploy and manage advanced wireless networks like 5G and 6G. Combined with their prior experience in the fleet, it will help us innovate and deploy technology that supports future operations and the department’s strategic vision.”
The FutureG Office is responsible for developing innovative solutions for 5G and FutureG cellular network systems and technologies that will enhance military wireless communications and data transfer capabilities through partnerships with industry and academia. Next-generation wireless technologies are one of the “seed areas of emerging opportunity” identified in the 2023 Defense Science and Technology Strategy as critical to the Department of Defense.
“Partnering with NPS provides FutureG with a continuing supply of operationally experienced students willing to tackle relevant problems,” said U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Dr. Ben Pimentel, FutureG’s Expeditionary and Tactical Employment (ETU) technical lead and NPS alumnus. “The hands-on experience students gain in research and classwork leveraging open source 5G/FutureG software will build a talent base to disseminate this technology throughout the force.”
5G has become the global technology standard for wireless cellular networks. It is much faster, more reliable, more flexible, and has higher capacity than previous technologies. 5G is spreading around the world primarily through commercial mobile phones, but also through the many connected devices of the Internet of Things.
For military forces, this brings a new vibe to battlefield communications: a scalable, deployable, and secure “network-in-a-box” that can support gray zone maritime operations and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), enabling forward deployment and communications resiliency in hostile or non-communicable environments.
This makes education and research into 5G/FutureG communications extremely important, according to U.S. Navy Capt. Chad Bolman, director of the NPS Cyber Warfare Center (CCW) and co-principal investigator on the ADOSD project.
“5G has two really fundamental differences,” he said. “One, and this is what the ADOSD project is all about, is the idea that everything is virtualized. Instead of needing a lot of custom equipment, cell phones run on a lot of virtual services. These virtual services allow the DoD to build a network for its purposes and needs, rather than using a network that, say, AT&T built to sell services to the private sector. Now we can actually use our network to do the work of the DoD, without having to pay to adapt someone else’s network.”
“The other thing is that 5G will be widespread, including in space,” Bormann continued. “We’re not done implementing the technology yet, but we’re currently using Starlink and our entire (pLEO) constellation to test 5G to satellite communications.”
Combined with masses of residual sensors such as unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned aerial systems, the battlefield will suddenly become brighter as the Internet of Things transitions from Wi-Fi to 5G, greatly reducing the need for traditional commercial cell towers.
“The idea of being able to move quickly from island to island and set up surveillance and targeting stations and intelligence gathering platforms — this kind of widespread, on-demand network — is essential to the vision of winning a maritime gray-zone conflict,” Bormann added.
However, the Department of Defense currently lacks formal or continuing graduate education programs to develop the advanced 5G/FutureG expertise to support this within the active duty force. The ADOSD project aims to fill this gap.
To that end, the project will be carried out in three distinct phases: The first phase will last 2-3 years and will enable masters and doctoral level research primarily aligned with the ETU portfolio of FutureG and other FutureG priorities: The research will leverage the DOD Open Testbed for Expeditionary FutureG (.EFG), an open-standard private 5G network testbed being built as part of the ADOSD effort.
NPS is already making good progress in this area, Bolman said. CCW has years of experience instantiating, researching and extending open source private 5G networks, and currently has six papers, three professors and 10 students. An additional two papers, four articles and four professors are researching new 5G security and privacy implementations. As the EFG is built and strengthened, NPS will leverage the knowledge, experience and solutions developed by practitioners in the OPS-5G program, a DARPA research program that studies applications of open source 5G networks.
The center will focus .EFG research along seven initiatives, including long-range private 5G networks for gray zone operations, industrial 5G for EABO, and real-time EABO 5G streaming communications for Department of Defense applications.
This research is strengthened by the strong industry relationships that NPS maintains: NPS has ongoing Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) with Qualcomm, AT&T, and Microsoft, and is currently in discussions with NVIDIA, T-Mobile, and others.
“The CRADAs that we signed are very important because these companies are on the cutting edge of 5G,” Bormann said. “They’ve been driving 5G research here and we’re going to continue to partner with them.”
He continued that NPS’s greatest research asset is the students themselves — experienced practitioners who come to NPS from all branches of the military and bring with them an innate curiosity about the future and what’s next.
“Our students are very interested in understanding 5G and are excited to take a technology they come into contact with almost every day and put it into a battlefield-deployed use case,” said Darren Rogers, associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department and co-principal investigator on the ADOSD project with Borman.
For example, Marine Corps Captain Lucas Vancina is in the first year of his master’s degree in computer science. As a communications officer, he brings extensive field experience working with communications networks to his NPS studies.
His graduate thesis will explore leveraging the scalability and flexibility of software-defined network architectures offered by open-source 5G radio access networks to make them more usable and secure for tactical applications, particularly in expeditionary environments.
“It’s really exciting to see how much we can do with 5G. We’re just scratching the surface,” Vansina said. “There’s so much that can be done with the 5G framework. This technology offers a lot of possibilities.”
“For my research, I think the most important takeaway from this work is that we’re starting to push the boundaries of what’s possible within the current network architecture specifications,” he continued. “I expect we’ll see more and more opportunities to add additional capabilities to what’s already offered within 5G.”
The second phase will last one to two years and will focus on curriculum development building on the research experiences carried out in the first phase. During this phase, the course progression leading to the degree will be implemented. Meanwhile, the individual research of Masters and PhD students will continue to be funded.
Here again, NPS is ahead of the curve, currently offering numerous courses and guided studies that introduce and cover 5G topics across a broad range of six different academic programs, including ECE, Computer Science (CS), the 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.
“What we’re looking at now is how to make this more than a one-off thing, but scale it and make it more accessible,” Bolman said. “The idea is to provide stackable 5G credentials and build a research testbed on campus that anyone can use.”
The stackable certificate provides multidisciplinary foundational knowledge on 5G that can be applied across multiple angles in different sectors to help explore the possibilities.
“MOVES faculty and students are exploring how to use 5G. They’re definitely looking at what 5G can bring to the fight and trying it out,” Rogers said. “The ECE department is really digging under the hood and exploring how it actually works and how it all works together — how do you connect to this network, how do you provision it, how do you manage it, what does the RF layer look like from an engineering standpoint?”
With the first and second phases firmly established, the final phase will aim to continually evolve the cellular curriculum to ensure technical and operational relevance and to continue to support master’s and doctoral studies. This third phase will continue indefinitely, as mutually agreed upon between FutureG and NPS.
