Resilient Tactical Edge Networks

The realistic near-to-mid-term serviceable addressable market for private 5G in U.S. agriculture is the subset with real mobility, coverage, reliability, or data-volume pain: row-crop operations running GPS-guided and autonomous equipment, specialty-crop growers using machine vision and agricultural robotics, dairies and feedlots with dense livestock-monitoring deployments, irrigated operations with distributed pump and center-pivot control, and large ranches requiring wide-area coverage for animal and asset tracking. The scale of the opportunity is well documented. USDA Economic Research Service data show about 1.88 million farms in 2024 (roughly 39% of all U.S. land). Only 79% of farms reported internet access of any kind, leaving roughly one in five farms without even basic connectivity. There is also documented evidence that productivity of farms with connectivity is significantly higher than the ones without any connectivity. Furthermore, FCC data show that 39% of rural Americans lack access to minimum fixed broadband speeds, compared with 4% of urban Americans, and coverage on cropland and rangeland specifically is worse still. Public carrier networks will not close this gap on their own; carrier tower economics favor population density, and most agricultural land has almost none. This segment buys on measurable operational outcomes (machine uptime, yield per acre, input cost per acre, water use, herd health, labor hours saved), not on global platform standardization, and its stated barriers to adoption are consistent and compounding: ROI ambiguity, high capex against tight and cyclical farm margins, no in-house RF/cellular or IT staff, harsh outdoor operating environments, a fragmented device ecosystem spanning tractors, drones, sensors, and wearables, and coverage requirements measured in thousands of acres rather than thousands of square feet. A proprietary private 5G platform from a tier-one vendor addresses almost none of these barriers directly; it is priced and supported for industrial campuses and multi-site enterprise accounts, not a single farm with a handful of mission-critical connectivity problems to solve. An all-open-source stack removes the structural cost and lock-in that makes proprietary platforms a poor fit for this segment. Because OCUDU's O-CU/O-DU communicate with the rest of the network over open, standardized interfaces (especially the O-RAN 7.2x split to the O-RU), the network can be assembled from whichever RU vendor best fits a given operation's coverage geometry and budget, including high-power CBRS Category B radios and high-gain sector antennas mounted on existing farm infrastructure (grain legs, silos, center-pivot towers, farmstead masts) to maximize covered acres per radio. Together, OCUDU, SD-Core, SD-RAN, and OSC form one integrated, fully open-source 5G stack that a regional systems integrator, agricultural equipment dealer, rural wireless ISP, or electric/telephone cooperative can deploy, support, and price as a right-sized, as-a-service offer for a single operation, instead of selling a broad, vendor-locked platform. That directly answers this market's stated preference for outcome-first, economically flexible offers, and it supports a coexistence posture (private 5G for mobility, coverage, and uplink-intensive problems; existing farmstead Wi-Fi and LPWAN sensors where they already work) rather than a rip-and-replace sale. The trade-off of an all-open-source stack is that the burden of proving interoperability, stability, and security shifts from a single vendor's warranty to the integrator and the open-source community itself. Agricultural buyers, who by their own account lack in-house cellular and cybersecurity expertise, have little tolerance for integration failures discovered mid-season, when planting, spraying, irrigation, and harvest windows cannot be rescheduled. This is exactly the gap the on-going OCUDU Testing & Validation Plan, and its Radio Access Network (RAN) Testing and Evaluation Center (RTEC)-centered extensions, are designed to close: independently witnessed, multi-vendor testing of device diversity, RU diversity, long-range outdoor RF performance, Core/RIC/SMO integration, and security. The proposal should leverage the current, on-going testing and evaluation activities in RTECs and associated results on this front. Although this topic is anchored in a specific vertical to ensure a concrete deployment environment, real users, and a defensible commercialization path, proposers should recognize and are required to present the technical work in terms of the generic network performance classes it advances. Improvements made to the OCUDU O-CU/O-DU under this effort (scheduler behavior, mobility management, uplink capacity, stability under sustained load, security features) are expected to generalize across verticals and to benefit the broader community of RAN developers building on OCUDU. The Technical Volume shall include a mapping of each selected use case, and its associated Section 3.0 KPMs, to the performance class or classes it exercises, and shall identify which anticipated OCUDU code or feature enhancements correspond to each class. For this topic, the dominant performance classes are massive scale and wide-area coverage: maximizing covered acres per radio using high-power CBRS Category B configurations, supporting large, sparse populations of low-rate sensor devices alongside high-uplink mobile equipment, and maintaining session continuity across long-range outdoor propagation conditions, with an evolution path to NTN integration. Research and development for this effort should address, at minimum, the following questions: • All-Open-Source Economics: What is the fully loaded cost (integration, support, spectrum, hardware, mounting infrastructure, and backhaul) of an OCUDU + SD-Core + SD-RAN + OSC deployment at farm scale relative to carrier coverage extensions and proprietary private-network platforms, and how should that be packaged as a CBRS-based, as-a-service offer within the price point agricultural buyers require ($75,000-$200,000 for a reference deployment covering approximately 2,000 acres)? • Last-Acre Coverage Economics: What combination of high-power CBRS Category B radios, high-gain sector antennas, existing vertical assets (grain legs, silos, pivot towers), and backhaul options (fiber where available, fixed wireless, or satellite/NTN) maximizes reliably covered acres per dollar, and how does the open RU ecosystem enabled by the O-RAN 7.2x split change that optimization relative to a single bundled radio line? • Use-Case-First Automation: Which of the use cases defined below deliver the fastest, most measurable ROI on the open-source stack, and what RTEC-executed interoperability tests (Device, RU, Core, RIC/SMO, and Infrastructure dimensions) are needed to validate each one end-to-end under realistic seasonal, weather, and terrain conditions? • Trust in Open Source: How does RTEC-executed testing of the full open-source stack (not just OCUDU) reduce the integration risk and skills-shortage barrier that agricultural buyers most often cite, and what evidence package best converts community-maintained, no-license-fee software into a procurement-ready proof point for a buyer with no in-house cellular expertise? Solutions leveraging super intelligence (SI) and machine learning (ML) for variable-rate input optimization, crop and livestock analytics, predictive equipment maintenance, network optimization, or automated fault resolution are encouraged but not required. DoW will consider any novel concept that increases the reliability, economics, and trustworthiness of an all-open-source private 5G/FutureG platform for the resilient tactical edge networks. Dual-use opportunities are expected across commercial agricultural operations, DoW installation land- and range-management, perimeter and agricultural-buffer operations on DoW installations, expeditionary logistics over large unimproved areas, and food-supply-chain resilience as a national-security concern. Proposers should address at least two of the following four use cases in their Phase II Statement of Work, and must identify which use case(s) their reference architecture and pilot deployment are designed to validate. Each use case below is defined in terms of the operational scenario it supports, the connectivity requirement it places on the platform, and the corresponding KPM table in Section 3.0. Because agricultural traffic spans extremes (from low-throughput, high-device-count telemetry such as soil sensors, livestock wearables, and irrigation command-and-control, to high-throughput, latency-sensitive streams such as UAS (unmanned Aircraft System) imagery backhaul, machine vision, and equipment teleoperation video) proposers are strongly encouraged to employ 5G network slicing to serve these disparate service classes simultaneously on the same physical network. Proposals that demonstrate slice-based traffic isolation and per-slice quality-of-service enforcement, with at least one low-throughput and one high-throughput use case operating concurrently on separate slices of a single deployment, will be viewed favorably. Device-Class Diversity and 5G RedCap. Each use-case set spans device classes from full-capability UEs (equipment modems, cameras, broadcast and production units) to reduced-capability IoT endpoints (sensors, wearables, tags, and trackers). Proposers shall address how the platform serves reduced-capability device classes, including 3GPP Release 17 Reduced Capability (RedCap) and Release 18 eRedCap UEs, and shall identify any OCUDU scheduler or feature enhancements required to support RedCap operation; such enhancements are strongly encouraged as upstream contributions under the common OCUDU benchmarking and enhancement work package. Where RedCap-certified devices are not commercially available for a given endpoint type at demonstration time, proposers may demonstrate with available device classes (or emulated RedCap UE profiles) and shall document the RedCap migration path.Use Case 1: Autonomous & Semi-Autonomous Field Equipment Connectivity GPS-guided and autonomous tractors, sprayers, harvesters, and field robots move continuously across fields, along farm roads between fields, and in and out of farmstead staging areas, requiring an uninterrupted control-plane, telemetry, and remote-supervision connection as they roam. Fully autonomous equipment cannot legally or safely operate without a live, low-latency link for remote monitoring and emergency stops, and farms without high-speed coverage cannot use it at all. So, this use case requires the platform to sustain low-latency, high-reliability connectivity and seamless handover as equipment moves between cells across the full field footprint, including possible road transit between non-contiguous parcels. Use Case 2: Aerial & Fixed Crop Intelligence Backhaul Drones/UAS performing scouting, mapping, and spot-spraying missions, machine-vision cameras on harvesters and sorting lines, and dense fields of soil-moisture, weather, and plant-health sensors generate continuous, uplink-heavy data streams that must reach an on-farm edge analytics system or agronomy platform with low delay to support same-pass and same-day decisions on irrigation, fertility, and pest control. This use case requires the platform to sustain high uplink throughput with low jitter for multiple simultaneous UAS and camera streams while concurrently aggregating telemetry from thousands of low-rate sensors per cell. Use Case 3: Livestock Monitoring & Ranch Operations Cattle, dairy, and other livestock operations increasingly rely on connected ear tags, collars, rumen boluses, and virtual-fencing systems that must reliably reach a monitoring platform to detect health events (calving, lameness, illness), enforce virtual fence boundaries, and locate animals across grazing land that public carrier networks do not cover. This use case requires the platform to sustain consistent, wide-area, low-rate coverage for high device counts across pasture and confinement areas, with low-latency alerting for time-critical animal-health and containment events. Use Case 4: Connected Farmstead, Irrigation & Grain Operations The equipment that keeps a farm running is scattered across the farmstead and the fields around it: center-pivot irrigation systems, pump stations, grain dryers and grain-handling equipment, security cameras, and safety devices such as lone-worker monitors and confined-space alarms for grain bins. The cost of a lost connection is high: a stalled pivot or failed pump during peak heat can cost yield within days, an unmonitored grain dryer is a fire risk, and a missed confined-space alarm at a grain bin can cost a life. Yet most of this equipment sits beyond the reach of farmstead Wi-Fi, leaving operators dependent on unlicensed, best-effort wireless links that were never designed for critical operations. This use case requires the platform to close that gap by extending secure, private coverage from the farmstead to all surrounding equipment on the same OCUDU-based network, delivering (1) reliable, low-data-rate command-and-control for irrigation and grain equipment, and (2) continuous uplink capacity for security video and worker-safety alerts.