Institute for Telecommunication Sciences

Earlier this year, NTIA issued a 5G Challenge Notice of Inquiry (NOI) on behalf of the Department of Defense (DoD), requesting information on how to use Prize Challenges to accelerate the development of the open 5G ecosystem and support DoD missions.

NTIA received 51 responses to the NOI, and today NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) is releasing an analysis of those responses to inform future collaborations between DoD and NTIA, including the potential of an initial 5G Challenge in 2022.

The purpose of 5G Challenges would be to support open interfaces, interoperability, and modularity – accelerating market forces that promote vendor diversity. Open and interoperable 5G networks will encourage new market participation, allowing innovative companies to develop plug-and-play 5G components and integrated systems. Organizations would be able to optimize their network’s operational efficiency by mixing and matching components from multiple vendors.

When public safety professionals use telecommunications systems to communicate with one another, it’s easy for them to tell when there’s an issue with the signals—they hear distorted sound, static or interruptions, to name a few examples.

Fixing these issues is much tougher. As the amount of spectrum used to transmit speech decreases, so do speech quality and intelligibility. A reliable system for measuring speech quality and intelligibility is required to optimize the two quantities—adjusting bandwidth use to efficiently deliver acceptable quality and intelligibility.

Unfortunately, measurements using human listeners are time-consuming and expensive. Existing automated measurements are fast, but require systems to be taken offline to be tested. Improving these kinds of measurements would lead to more reliable and efficient telecommunications systems. This is especially critical for systems used by first responders, when clear voice communications can save lives.

To make maximally efficient use of radio spectrum, industry and government need a measurement method that can be deployed to in-service networks without needing access to the original signal for comparison. In other words, a machine that can learn to do what humans do effortlessly: judge the quality of a speech signal when it arrives at the end of the transmission channel without knowing anything about what it sounded like when it started. This is called a no-reference, or NR, measurement.

WASHINGTON – The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) has issued a Broad Agency Announcement to procure prototype or commercial-off-the-shelf Open RAN equipment and software as part of an effort to test state-of-the-art Open RAN technology.