5G/FutureG Market Survey / Request for Information

Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific, on behalf of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering (OUSD R&E) 5G & FutureG Office and the National Science Foundation, is seeking information from industry and other stakeholders regarding open-source software for 5G/6G Open Radio Access Networks (5G/6G Open RAN) Central Unit + Distributed Unit (CU+DU) components via a Market Survey (MS) / Request for Information (RFI).
 
This MS/RFI supports the development of a complete end-to-end 5G/6G open-source software ecosystem for use by the DoD and the academic and industrial research community.
 
Open-source software is vital to the Department of Defense (DoD) for code transparency, which is required to identify security vulnerabilities and boost community contributions in threat identification. The DoD encourages a collaborative environment spurred on by transparency in software components and their dependencies. Such an ecosystem will further strengthen operators’ security posture.
 
The goal is to identify CU+DU software capable of development into a solution that meets requirements for deployment by DoD and other U.S. government agencies. The software should be flexible regarding segmentation between the DU and a separate radio unit and have the capacity to support broad research use. This MS/RFI seeks information on the initial investment and commercial business case for long-term sustainment, transition, or continued use of the CU+DU solutions as open-source software. Further, this MS/RFI seeks comments from potential research users of the CU+DU open-source software about the requirements necessary for successful research use and the roles they could play to help ensure success.
 
Interested parties can find criteria and amplifying information at https://sam.gov/opp/ac6fed545d8c4826b134af6661c5edf4/view.

The deadline for submissions is Nov. 2, 2023.