The NIWC Atlantic Palmetto Technical Bridge (PTB), in collaboration with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD R&E), is seeking a Technical Collaboration Exchange with practitioners knowledgeable on advanced 5G Test & Evaluation (T&E) of infrastructure and equipment supporting the modernization of infrastructure and operations within Department of Defense (DoD).  The T&E needs to include, but not limited to Lab as a Service (LaaS), Testing as a Service (TaaS), and 5G Field Testing Equipment at DoD sites. 

Advanced 5G Developmental Testing capabilities are areas of interest that include the following:

• 5G Network Emulation Environment ((i.e. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Simulator, User Equipment (UE) devices, High Bandwidth Edge Devices, and Core))
• Sandboxes & Test Beds for advanced use cases
• Advanced penetration testing to identify 5G Security Vulnerabilities
• Full Stack capability for Application Demonstration and Agile Testing via Cloud Services.
• Field Testing for Performance, Quality of Service (QoS), and Latency for a 5G Spectrum Sharing System.

Desired Testing Capabilities:

• Over-the-Air (OTA) protocol testing for a multichannel testbed, in-channel measurements, near and far field. Post-processing tool for data analytics of the OTA collected data.
• Emulation of physical UE devices (upwards of thousands of devices, 2-4000) and can be mixed with Long Term Evolution (LTE), New Radio (NR), and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
• Emulation of eNB (eNodeB)/gNB (gNodeB)
• Core testing for verification, functional and isolation testing of 5G core functions as well as gNB.
• Simulation of real-world applications to predict device, system, and network performance under realistic load conditions.
• Spectrum simulation tools for determining impact on non-5G signals in a Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) environment.
• Virtual Environment (VE) designed to test the functional and performance testing of physical and virtual network infrastructure, capacity, scalability, and convergence using scaled protocol emulation and traffic
• VE delivers comprehensive functional and performance testing to validate user QoE (Quality of Experience) in physical and virtual networks as well as VE emulates web, video, voice, storage, VPN, wireless, infrastructure, and encapsulation/security protocols to create realistic scenarios.
• Identifying trouble-spots within the network such as weak coverage, drop/blocked data call issues, throughput and latency problems.

Request for Synopsis:

If you as a practitioner have knowledge of any of the above items or more than one, the government kindly requests that you provide a one page or less synopsis.  The government further requests that the one page, or less, synopsis be in 12 font, single space with an explanation of your company’s approach and/or experience using the 5G Test and Evaluation items listed above on or before March 29^{th ,} 2021.  Received synopses will be reviewed by the government and a decision will be made as to whether to have a follow-on 45 minute virtual technical collaboration exchange on April 8^th, 2021.  There are a limited number of time slots. The Government will notify companies selected for a follow-on virtual technology exchange by April 5^th, 2021.  If you have not heard from government by April 5^th, 2021, than the company has not been selected.

Send your synopsis to the ptbsubmissions.fct@navy.mil. The Subject Line on all submissions must include, “NIWC Atlantic PTB – 5G Test Equipment Technical Collaboration Exchange <Company/Entity Name>”.  Please also, include contact information in both the synopsis and the body of the email (eg Company Name, POC, telephone number, etc.)

There is no specific evaluation criteria to the selection process.  Selection is based on interest to the government. 

Synopsis submissions are requested by COB March 29^th, 2021