After five years of testing, the U.S. Navy is ready to implement 5G on ships. The Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) reported that implementing 5G onboard Navy vessels will improve sailors’ quality of life and work, known as Quality of Service (QoS).
The U.S. Navy partnered with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Research and Engineering FutureG office and Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic on the initiative. 5G will be implemented both on board ships and onshore, helping ensure better overall QoS, including supporting gaming and FaceTime while keeping security in mind.
“What our NIWC Atlantic (5G) engineers did with industry partners has laid a solid engineering foundation for 5G technology to potentially take off across the Navy,” said Peter Reddy, NIWC Atlantic Executive Director. “The use cases we worked on here were shipboard and pier side, and there are a lot of other use cases that 5G will satisfy in the Department of the Navy.”
DVIDS reported that NIWC Atlantic could not test 5G on an operating ship without disrupting daily activities. Testing took place aboard the USS Wisconsin, a retired battleship now operating as a museum, ported in Norfolk, VA. NIWC Atlantic engineers deployed a private 5G core and tested 5G coverage and performance in the ship’s interior spaces.
Although testing in the interior spaces proved successful, the team found it difficult to predict whether commercial 5G solutions would work as expected in Navy operational environments. NIWC Atlantic has run into its share of challenges but is developing collaborative solutions to ensure 5G works across all devices and systems.
According to DVIDS, the NIWC Atlantic 5G team has developed a reference architecture for shipwide, littoral, blue-water, pier-side, and ashore operational domains. They have also designed and implemented the Department of Defense’s (DoD) maritime 5G multi-vendor (shipboard and pier-side networks) testbed, which enables the experimentation of 5G networks and user equipment in a wide range of 5G frequencies. Lastly, they implemented the DoD’s first Voice over New Radio and Video over New Radio private 5G network, achieving improved QoS.
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