A new, cutting-edge technology that will allow industries to deploy their own private, flexible, and secure 5G networks across their business areas is being developed by a consortium of companies from the UK.
The Secure 5G project is building a flexible platform that will enable companies to roll out and maintain their own quantum-safe private networks, with targeted applications for Industry 4.0, mobile edge computing (MEC), the Internet of Things (IoT) and highly secure environments, such as defence. The aim of Secure 5G is to reduce costs, while accelerating the pace of innovation, enabling faster roll-out of services and more secure communications via a UK sovereign supply chain.
The project, funded through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, involves a team from Compound Semiconductor Applications (CSA) Catapult, Lime Microsystems Ltd, Slipstream Engineering Design Ltd and Arqit.
Open radio access networks (RAN) resulting from the project are providing a more open and accessible 5G network architecture, improving competition, network flexibility and reducing costs.
More and more network operators and enterprises are choosing to deploy Open RAN 5G networks as it prevents being locked in to using large vendors who currently offer highly proprietary solutions, whilst at the same time diversifying the supply chain and enabling more innovative and integrated technologies.
As Open RAN mobile networks become more prevalent, larger, more complex there is a need for solutions that are inherently more secure, while offering a level of flexibility which enables them to adapt to emerging threats with far greater agility.
The platform developed through the Secure 5G project brings together a radio frequency (RF) power amplifier (Slipstream Engineering Design) with open-source network-in-a-box solution (Lime Microsystems), underpinned by a quantum-safe symmetric key agreement platform (Arqit) and state-of-the-art test and evaluation support (CSA Catapult).
Secure 5G aims to bring many suppliers into the Open RAN ecosystem, diversifying and democratising 5G deployment using cost effective, programmable radio modules. The project also aims to empower network owners with the flexibility to maintain and upgrade services by running their applications at the very edge of the network, which could be anything from secure on-premises file sharing through to low latency machine learning.
The flexibility and reconstruction of the system, coupled with processing power that is powerful enough to run resource intensive apps, will allow for further developments in hardware and services by the wider UK telecoms supply chain.
About Arqit
Arqit supplies a unique quantum safe encryption Platform-as-a-Service which makes the communications links or data at rest of any networked device or cloud machine secure against current and future forms of attack – even from a quantum computer. Arqit's product, QuantumCloud™, enables any device to download a lightweight software agent, which can create encryption keys in partnership with any number of other devices. The keys are computationally secure, optionally one-time use and zero trust. QuantumCloud™ can create limitless volumes of keys in limitless group sizes and can regulate the secure entrance and exit of a device in a group. The addressable market for QuantumCloud™ is every connected device.