Three new projects focusing on 5G and upcoming 6G systems have recently been introduced by the Department of Defense’s Innovate Beyond 5G (IB5G) Program.
IB5G program director Sumit Roy stated that “the DoD has a vital interest in promoting 5G-to-NextG wireless technology and concept demonstrations.” These initiatives highlight our ongoing investments through public-private sector partnership on research and development for crucial Beyond 5G technological enablers required to provide high-performance, secure, and resilient network operations for the future warfighter.
One of the fresh initiatives is called Open6G, which the DoD described as a collaborative venture between business and academia with the purpose of launching 6G systems analysis on Open RAN. To enable developing 5G and future applications, the program will concentrate on Open RAN research and open-source implementation of 5G protocol stack features.
The agency added that Open6G will ” help an industry and federal government NextG ecosystem pursuing 6G technological goals” and act as the DoD’s “center for development, testing, and integration of trusted upgrades.” Through a collaborative arrangement with the Army Research Laboratory, the research is overseen by Northeastern University’s Kostas Research Institute. The Institute for Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University will house the technical project.
In addition, IB5G and Zylinium Research launched a new initiative called Spectrum Exchange Security and Scalability. Technologies that share the spectrum are becoming more important as wireless networks deal with rising user demand. Zylinium Research created Spectrum Exchange, a network service appliance that receives, plans, and distributes spectrum resources, in response to this demand. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Study and Engineering (OUSD) provided $1.64 million for Zylinium’s Spectrum Exchange research (R&E). (Researchers from Zylinium took part in the DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) three-year Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.)
IB5G established the Massive Multi-Input/Multi-Output (MIMO) from MHz to GHz project in cooperation with Nokia Bell Labs. This project was awarded $3.69 million by OUSD (R&E)/IB5G under an Open Broad Agency Announcement solicitation for Advanced Wireless Communications research. The Department of Defense noted that Massive MIMO technology is a “critical enabler for the warfighter due to its ability to increase resiliency and throughput for wireless tactical communications.” According to the government, the endeavor would investigate crucial technological elements that permit scaling MIMO technology across several bands and bandwidths as well as use cases geared toward the DoD.
The U.S. has been conducting research on potential 6G technologies in a proactive manner. The Next G Alliance, an endeavor to promote North American wireless technology leadership over the next ten years through private sector-led activities with the initial focus on as-yet-unstandardized 6G networks, was previously established by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS).
A new analysis from ATIS’ Next G Alliance, which forecasts the technologies that will be necessary to develop the 6G future as well as areas in which additional research is needed on North American 6G priorities, was published last month.
The National 6G Roadmap, which was also created by the Next G Alliance, describes the precise technologies required to realize the vision. The new paper outlines these technologies.
The report gives a summary of 47 crucial 6G candidates in the following categories: component technologies, radio technologies, system and network architecture, network operations, administration and maintenance (OA&M), and service enablement, as well as trustworthiness, which includes security, reliability, privacy, and resilience.
Source: RCRwireless
