Commercial 5G mobile broadband technology delivers high-speed, real-time access to data and ultra-fast responsiveness, which far exceed the capabilities of earlier generation technology for mobile broadband. The deployment of 5G creates revolutionary opportunities to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and billions of connected sensors, smart appliances and wireless devices. It also creates new risks and challenges in security, safety, reliability, and service assurance.
Peraton Labs is at the forefront of 5G with standards leadership, a full-featured 5G testbed, and a growing set of customer-funded 5G research, development, demonstration and testing projects.
International standards serve a critical role in the creation and development of global markets for new technologies by enabling interoperability, innovation, and economies of scale. Peraton Labs has a long tradition of industry leadership in networking and communications standards, dating back more than 30 years to our beginnings as part of Bell Laboratories and Bellcore and including key contributions from ATM and SONET to MIME for multimedia email attachments. We are significant participants in the advancement of mobile communications standards and have made over 2000 technical contributions to 3GPP, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project responsible for developing 5G specifications. We have also made numerous contributions to ATIS, IETF, IEEE, Wi-Fi Alliance and others and are active leaders in the gnu radio community in software-defined, radio-based signal processing applications, including channel equalization and adaptive event processing.
5G offers tremendous potential from autonomous vehicles, critical infrastructure operations and remote surgical procedures to the defense of our nation and enhanced virtual and augmented reality. Harnessing this potential requires not only the development of new capabilities for security, reliability and service assurance, but also testbeds, trials and real-world experiments to operationalize the technology for key applications. Peraton Labs operates a cutting edge 5G testbed in Red Bank, New Jersey, which has both Stand Alone (SA) and non-Stand Alone (NSA) capability and uses virtualized Core components from Open5GCore and a commercial core provider. The testbed comprises three cells for the Radio Access Network (RAN), a virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC) with Non-Stand-Alone capability, 5G handsets, an RF-shielded room and 5G-ready testing equipment. The testbed supports testing of 5G NR and LTE spectrum sharing and allows experimentation of numerous 5G capabilities at 28GHz, with beamforming, dual connectivity radio links in NR and LTE.
Peraton Labs is leading a number of innovative 5G projects which span research, development, testing and experimentation. Here are a few examples of some of these exciting projects.
- We are developing a zero trust, distributed security architecture for 5G to protect against supply chain attacks and rogue devices and defend resource-constrained endpoints. Our SEDIMENT solution establishes a distributed and scalable security architecture for large numbers of networked IoT devices with widely disparate size, weight and power (SWaP). SEDIMENT relies entirely on software, requires no modification to existing devices, and quickly identifies and isolates compromised devices. This solution is particularly well-suited to low-cost, battery-operated IoT systems that cannot support the costly and power-hungry software verification and encryption methods commonly used in cell phones, laptops, and servers.
- We are creating programmable, real-time, distributed defense-in-depth solution for 5G services to protect against cyberattacks and ensure service availability. Our ProD3 solution utilizes edge computing and programmable network switches to detect and block malicious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at scale, with targeted defense from as many as 1 trillion bots at program end. ProdD3 not only provides three synergistic defensive capabilities – programmable mitigation for distributed denial of service attacks, real-time response and restoration for network compromise, and proactive deception-based defense – but also delivers new approaches to trustworthy code generation and deployment to ensure that the defense capabilities themselves do not become vectors for cyberattack.
- We are leading two projects in large-scale experimentation and prototyping of dual-use 5G technology for the Department of Defense (DOD). By supporting full-scale testing of novel 5G prototypes in operational environments, these DOD projects will accelerate implementation of advancements in logistics, smart warehouses, dynamic spectrum utilization and spectrum sharing.
- The Navy Smart Warehouse 5G Network Enhancement Prototype at Naval Base Coronado (NBC), California will develop a 5G-enabled smart warehouse focused on transshipment between shore facilities and naval units. Peraton Labs will develop an end-to-end, device-to-logistics-server security solution for 5G and additional IoT capacity based on novel cybersecurity techniques, advances in 5G radio and a zero trust 5G architecture
- The Dynamic Spectrum Utilization Project at Hill Air Force Base (HAFB), Utah addresses the challenge of enabling Air Force radars to dynamically share spectrum with 5G cellular services in the 3.1–3.45 GHz band. To meet mission needs, the Air Force requires effective capabilities and processes to allow radar spectrum sharing or coexistence with both cooperating and non-cooperating 5G networks. Peraton Labs will develop an intelligent 5G system control based on machine learning and sophisticated signal processing techniques to rapidly detect and react to radar activity, interpret radar-obfuscated sensor data and improve spectrum utilization