The US Department of Defense (DoD) unveiled a new Request for Prototype Proposal (RPP) calling for industry input on 5G technology development related to a Smart Warehouse testbed, network enhancements and applications at the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany, Georgia, the department announced on Thursday.

"The National Spectrum Consortium is the place where government, industry and academia come together to solve the toughest challenges related to 5G technology development," said Joseph Dyer, chief strategy officer of the National Spectrum Consortium. 

DoD issued the RPP to support government requirements, including NSC-20-2010, NSC-20-2020 and NSC-20-2030. NSC-20-2010 will require a 5G Prototype Testbed. Within the prototype testbed, DoD will require contractors to design and deploy a 5G network prototype that will serve as a reference implementation for Marine Corps smart warehouse operations. 

For the NSC-20-2020 RPP,  5G Prototype Enhancements, DoD has asked contractors to design and field prototype 5G network enhancements that will serve as reference implementations for Marine Corps smart warehouse operations. 

NSC-20-2030, or 5G Prototype Applications, will look to design and field prototype 5G enabled applications that serve as reference implementations for Marine Corps smart warehouse operations.

The RPP announcement marks the first of four DoD has released. The department has projected the release in relation to 5G technology development.  Other planned RPPs relate to augmented and virtual reality for training purposes and dynamic spectrum sharing.

 "This is the first of four proposals that the DOD has released.  We encourage our membership, which is made up of traditional contractors and innovative startups, to collaborate and respond to these incredibly important RPPs," added Dyer.

About the National Spectrum Consortium

National Spectrum Consortium is a team of our Nation's leading technologists, engineers, scientists, manufacturers, and program managers from industry, academia, and government working to solve the toughest problems facing the nation with regard to 5G, 5G-based technologies, and spectrum access and sharing.  The NSC's mission is to foster collaboration among Government, Industry and Academia to identify, develop and demonstrate the enabling technologies necessary to broaden the military and commercial access to and use of the electromagnetic spectrum for 5G and beyond.

Guy Cavallo, deputy chief information officer of the Small Business Administration, told Federal News Network in an interview published Thursday about SBA’s cloud migration experience as part of the implementation of the continuous diagnostics and mitigation program.

Cavallo discussed how he and Maria Roat, CIO of SBA and a 2020 Wash100 award winner, advanced efforts to self-fund the cloud transition by turning off contracts for on-premise architecture, including hardware maintenance support contracts for servers, in order to generate savings.

“And then once we were in the cloud, the cybersecurity capabilities just kept taking off every week” he said. “We saw enhancements and that just reinforced that we were headed on the right path.”

Cavallo also discussed the cloud’s advantage over on-premise architecture when it comes to handling large volumes of data.

“One problem with the on-premise architecture is the amount of data that every device generates,” Cavallo said. “It’s just a tremendous amount of data that would require an expensive hardware on-premise to deal with. And we’d constantly be buying more disk space, where, with the cloud, we’re able to just keep expanding our usage and pay a fraction of the cost of owning the hardware ourselves.”

Walter Copan, director of the National Institutes of Science and Technology, appeared Wednesday before a House subcommittee to discuss NIST’s work in quantum science and artificial intelligence, Nextgov reported Thursday.

He told members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee’s research and technology subpanel about NIST’s achievements in the quantum field, including work in quantum simulation and development of a quantum logic clock. He also offered updates on the establishment of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium.

“Looking forward, over the coming years NIST will focus a portion of its quantum research portfolio on the grand challenge of quantum networking,” Copan said in his written testimony. “Serving as the basis for secure and highly efficient quantum information transmission that links together multiple quantum devices and sensors, quantum networks will be a key element in the long-term evolution of quantum technologies.” 

Copan noted that NIST needs to ramp up efforts to advance the development of tools designed to provide insights into AI programs. He added that there is “important work to be done in standardization, so that the United States can lead the world in the application of [AI] in a trustworthy and ethical manner.”

Copan, who is also undersecretary of commerce for standards and technology, responded to lawmakers’ questions about 5G and the condition of NIST facilities.

The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing Thursday to ask supply chain experts about potential options to prevent future shortages of drugs and other critical goods amid the coronavirus pandemic and reduce reliance on foreign countries like China for such products, FCW reported Thursday.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) mentioned the national security concern posed by vulnerabilities in the supply chain during the hearing

Wynne Briscoe, acting director of the Maryland Small Business Development Center, said the Small Business Administration could help come up a list of U.S.-based alternative suppliers and classify products and services related to such firms using the NAICS codes.

"The SBA would produce the list by contacting all the companies it now works with, or has worked with over the past decade or so, through SBDCs (small business development centers) and other SBA related organizations," Briscoe said. She added the SBDCs and small business groups could help collect and maintain the data.

The Space Development Agency is looking into the use of cloud computing for missile tracking activities, Space News reported Wednesday.

Joy Stein, tracking layer lead at the SDA, said relying on missile-tracking sensors alone would result in a bottleneck due to large amounts of data.

“Cloud computing is one of those architectures that gives you flexibility to continue to make refinements with the data you provide, how that gets processed and where it goes," she told an audience at the Satellite 2020 conference.

Stein added that the cloud computing approach will also present cybersecurity challenges.

SDA has already launched solicitations to deploy satellites that would detect missiles and generate information for sharing.