Jane Edwards
The Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center have partnered to establish a 5G network at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
”We expect to start construction on the network at Nellis in July and have it fully operational in January of next year,†Joseph Evans, technical director for 5G and lead for DoD’s 5G development effort, said in a statement published Thursday.
The office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and USAFWC will use mobile operations centers to test the 5G network, which will feature relocatable cell towers.
The Information Warfare Research Project, an industry consortium, will use other transactional authority to look for commercial software prototypes in support of the 5G development effort of DoD and the Air Force.
IWRP will seek prototypes in two areas: applications and services for survivable command and control and wireless network enhancements. The first area will develop C2 software to support mission execution and distributed planning functions and apps that facilitate C2 operations under various 5G network conditions, while the other area will focus on building and testing network slicing and other novel 5G features.
DoD said testing at Nellis will kick off in January and run through three 12-month phases.
