Building on its successes the past few years demonstrating and proving out its 5th generation wireless technology in the ground and air warfighting domains, Lockheed Martin [LMT] in 2024 plans to showcase space-based 5G.MIL capabilities aboard a satellite base station that will connect with devices and networks on Earth, the company said on Thursday.
The upcoming space mission follows a successful laboratory demonstration on Oct. 26 of the Advanced 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) Satellite Base Station, validating that the payload is ready to provide global high-speed connectivity for warfighters. Lockheed Martin said the satellite base station performed high-speed data transfers—including live video streaming—with prototype NTN user equipment that meets the 3GPP mobile broadband Release 17 standard.
Dan Rice, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for 5G.MIL programs, highlighted two reasons for why space-based 5G base stations are important. First, is usefulness for global, interoperable backhaul communications with hybrid base stations on air, ground, and sea-based platforms that may not have access to fixed infrastructure such as fiber or microwave, he told Defense Daily.
Putting a hybrid base station in space also allows direct connectivity to user devices, he said.
“And that’s what this space hybrid base station is designed to do, connect directly to 5G non-terrestrial network user devices in a way that would enable those users to talk to each other and back to the data networks as well,” Rice said.
Lockheed Martin has been demonstrating variants of its 5G hybrid base station in ground and air applications. The base station is like a commercial cell tower but with lower size, weight, and power to meet warfighter needs in fixed and mobile applications, Rice said.
In a demonstration in 2022, Intel Corp. [INTC] integrated a 5G Core and Open Radio Access Network into a Lockheed Martin 5G.MIL hybrid base station to show over-the-air connectivity that can be transitioned to military aircraft.
Lockheed Martin is leveraging commercial technology for its open systems-based hybrid base station and 5G.MIL efforts.
In the recent hardware-in-the-loop lab demonstration, Lockheed Martin’s subcontractors included AccelerComm Ltd. for the 5G NTN Layer 1 PHY solutions, Radisys for core software, and Keysight Technologies [KEYS] for standards-based development testing of the regenerative base station that will be deployed on a satellite.
Lockheed Martin has not finalized a launch date and provider for the 2024 experiment, which is internally funded. The space hybrid base station will be one of multiple payloads aboard the company’s Tactical Satellite (TacSat) demonstration spacecraft.
TacSat has also been funded in-house to rapidly demonstrate reconfigurable connectivity, sensing, and processing to meet tactical warfighting needs.
Lockheed Martin’s hybrid communications approach is called 5G.MIL Unified Network Solutions, which Rice said is aimed at being interoperable with legacy and future 5G capabilities and Defense Department tactical data links.
“We’re trying to find ways to stitch together out at the tactical edge those existing and emerging DoD tactical comms with the 5G architecture in a way that enables it to be unified from the enterprise level infrastructure all the way out to those tactical edge devices,” he said.
Overall, the 5G.MIL effort is leveraging commercial technologies and Lockheed Martin’s expertise as an integrator and a prime contractor that provides solutions for all the military services to help DoD fulfill its vision for interconnected joint all domain operations.
The various ground and air-based 5G.MIL demonstrations the past few years have matured Lockheed Martin’s solution to the point where in 2024 the focus will be on “transition,” moving the prototypes into military engineering and manufacturing development and commercial development and then into production, Rice said.
Lockheed Martin is working with commercial and DoD customers, including the office of the under secretary of defense for research and engineering and the new DoD chief information officer-led 5G cross functional team to identify opportunities, Rice said. The DoD team is working with the military services on their transitions plans for 5G, he said.