Pentagon’s FutureG Office gearing up for new prototyping effort

The Defense Department is getting ready to release a request for prototype proposals as the military prepares to integrate future wireless, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities into its networks.

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.