Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, Florida International University, Virginia Tech, and PQSecure Technologies, have joined forces to create a universal radio adapter for U.S. military and government infrastructure systems.
The multidisciplinary research team is one of 16 selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the 2022 Convergence Accelerator program to reduce the likelihood of interception, disruption or jamming of communications over 5G networks.
According to the press release, the goal of the universal radio adapter is to provide the government and infrastructure operators secure communications anywhere and anytime.
“This cooperative research project will extend and enhance the capabilities of the participating universities, industry and community partners, and will provide a streamlined and stable platform for industry-university-community engagement and collaboration in the critical field of secure wireless communications,” said Stella Batalama, dean, Florida Atlantic University (FAU) College of Engineering and Computer Science.
The research team will also develop a 5G technologies center to train undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students, focusing on recruiting Hispanic and other underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to strengthen their competitive skillsets.
High school students will get hands-on experience working with graduates and undergraduates at the RF Communications, Millimeter-Waves, and Terahertz Lab at Florida International University, and the Center for Connected Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at Florida Atlantic University.
“We anticipate that these activities will motivate underrepresented minority/female high school students to pursue engineering,” said Batalama. “Our researchers are already working with students from the Suncoast Community High School in Riviera Beach and FAU’s A.D. Henderson University School.”
The acceleration of 5G solutions will help defense department personnel, aircrafts, satellites, mobile phones, vehicles, sensors, drones and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices operate through a friendly or adversary 5G network infrastructure and seamlessly connect with devices on trusted U.S. military networks, while providing end-to-end data integrity by data hiding and by autonomously switching between communications pathways.
Researchers will develop a waveform-agnostic adapter that will be compatible with U.S. Department of Defense communication protocols and will be able to interact with other 5G networks. The convergence research effort includes RF systems and antenna design, hardware-software co-design, software-defined radio prototyping, adaptive signal processing, data analytics and training dataset design for artificial intelligence/machine learning, post-quantum-computing secure cryptography, physical layer security and interference avoidance, and policy and governance for secure communications.
“5G is used to connect more than just mobile phones, expanding the so-called threat surface,” said Dimitris Pados, who is the principal investigator (PI) for Florida Atlantic University (FAU).
Pados is also the Schmidt Eminent Scholar Professor in the FAU Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and serves as acting director of FAU’s Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering and director of the Center for Connected Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence.
“The 5G radio access network standards offer increased spectral efficiency and new spectrum utilization such as millimeter-wave,” Pados added. “The 5G core is designed to support a distributed architecture of microservices implemented on an elastic cloud-based backplane.”
Pados has served as PI/co-PI on National Science Foundation and defense department research grants totaling more than $19 million. Most recently, he led a multi-university, multi-industry Department of Defense project to develop a cognitive wireless network from inception to testbed demonstration.
Utilizing these networks, the research team will carry out accelerated research and development to advance security and resiliency of end systems connecting to 5G networks and leveraging zero trust principles where possible.
“The end objective of the project is to develop and implement new solutions that will enable us to communicate securely through public 5G networks that may be friendly or not,” said Pados. “Our solutions involve advanced authentication techniques, re-encryption and data hiding. Success of this effort will have profound impact on privacy and the future of daily civilian use of the networks.”
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