5G Autonomous Reconfigurable Electronic Surveillance (5G-ARES)

The US Congress has directed the DoD to harness 5G to enhance military capabilities and maintain a technological advantage on the battlefield. Future force-on-force engagements will need the massive sensor connectivity, high data rate/low latency and other features that 5G can provide. But relying on unknown 5G infrastructure carries great risk to US Forces. We need to know critical details about the 5G laydown and detailed implementation of 5G in potential conflict zones to ensure that secure, trusted, time critical and robust performance, which weapon and intelligence systems depend on, can be achieved. Realtime knowledge of deployed 5G network attributes (network metadata, network coverage, loading/traffic etc.) is therefore mission critical. However, the densely fielded 5G base stations with highly directive beamforming fundamentally change the approach needed for the Electronic Support/Electronic Surveillance mission.  Cobalt is building 5G-ARES; an Affordable, Re-configurable Electronic Surveillance sensor to address this mission need. The low cost, commercial components of our existing 5G technology will be leveraged by the USAF to rapidly field affordable 5G ES sensors.