With dynamic spectrum sharing experimentation underway at Hill Air Force Base, UT, testbed vendor Nokia is gearing up to support application developers' efforts to build on top of the newly deployed 5G cellular network while keeping an eye trained on opportunities to potentially enhance the available use cases for its work.
That comes as the base in early December unveiled the successful deployment of its network, clearing the way for officials to ultimately explore options for 5G technologies and the Air Force’s airborne radars to coexist or work together on overlapping spectral bands in the 3.1 to 3.45 GHz range.
That mid-band spectrum is important for both commercial 5G and Defense Department purposes, exemplified recently by the National Spectrum Consortium’s decision to launch a new industry group to identify paths for current and projected needs in the 3.1 to 3.45 GHz range.
Back at Hill, where work on the three-phased undertaking kicked off in the spring of 2021, Nokia and 11 other vendors are operating on a 39-month timeframe involving “three lines of effort,” according to a December Defense Department release: 5G testbed, 5G applications and 5G network enhancements.
The project and initial testbed have begun in the 3.3 to 3.45 GHz range, which Mike Loomis, general manager for Nokia’s U.S. federal business, said aligns with the company’s existing commercial equipment in that band. That availability, he said, has allowed officials to start to “put some of our software and mitigation technology on the existing radio head” before the experimentation upgrade to the 3.1 to 3.45 GHZ range comes in May 2022.
“So, it's like we get a head start and get things going and then expand to the full spectrum,” he told Inside Defense in a December interview.
Ahead of that expansion, the effort’s first phase focuses on “radio delivery, radio configuration, site configuration” and more, Loomis said, as officials lay their network into place and then prepare to expose it to users -- namely, developers, who will then build applications on top of the network. That work, he said, clears the way for further testing.
“That’s where I think a lot of the real exciting work comes,” he said. “My hope is that, at the conclusion of this, the industry comes together, we've built some great technology that allows the United States and the Air Force to be efficient with this spectrum, one way or the other. I'm looking forward to that outcome, and I'm proud to be part of that solution.”
Debra Stanislawski, director of 5G tranche prototyping and experimentation in the Pentagon's research and engineering office, told Inside Defense in November officials “believe that we are seeding critical sharing technology with” Nokia.
That technology, she said in an email, “will be immediately transitionable and have identified several exciting coexistence technologies that are realistically implementable and controllable.”
“We believe the positive impacts to the U.S. mid-band spectrum situation justifies the value of the program,” she said, later adding: “The future value of spectrum in the 3.1-3.45 band will be directly related to the success that this program has removing encumbrances to network operators, thus minimally impacting 5G performance while maintaining incumbent protection.”
The December DOD release noted awards for the Hill experimentation effort totaled $173 million. Defense officials hadn’t previously disclosed the value of the awards tied to work at the base, part of a broader $600 million contracting effort for a range of 5G projects across five U.S. military test sites.
Those efforts involve smart warehouses for logistics operations, augmented and virtual reality training, and more.
As officials move through the current and future phases at Hill, Loomis said Nokia is keeping an eye out for potential openings to expand the work underway at the base.
Pointing to Nokia’s expertise in private wireless and deployments across a variety of areas, Loomis said he’s interested in looking at ways to “bring that experience back to some of these test beds and see if there’s more we can build on this besides just" dynamic spectrum sharing.
“I have a lot of ideas, and we have lots of partners out there in industry,” he said, cautioning that his commentary represents his own thinking and not that of the Air Force. “And since this testbed is built, let’s take advantage of it.”
Beyond the timeline of the Hill project, Loomis said Nokia is looking to “become the supplier of choice for 5G” to DOD, as the company goes “out of our way to invest to win things like Hill” and other use cases funded by the NSC.
Describing the “ideal outcome” for Nokia as the 3.1 to 3.45 GHz range becoming “a viable band for a market in the U.S.,” Loomis said the company is also looking to use the products built for Hill as a foundation and deploy 5G and wireless on top of it -- efforts that could, for example, be enabled through communication service providers, via a Citizens Broadband Radio Service-like manner, or in a private wireless situation in which the DOD keeps the spectrum.
“But in order for us to get to any one of those positive outcomes, we first have to prove that we can reliably mitigate interference and not screw up the radars,” he said. “Once we prove that, then we have an opportunity to get to work on how the spectrum’s utilized.”