The faces of FRANC

Getting projects together to foster collaboration has been part of the success of UK5G and will form a major part of the new UKTIN organisation. The first event under the Future Networks Programmes saw the first opportunity for projects to meet each other and key people from DCMS. If you couldn’t make it to the event, or even if you did, here are the people you need to speak to, to build the ecosystem

5Drive

Best of British

David Owens, of Virgin Media O2, explained the challenges of integrating national mobile networks with small private ones. His project is working with Wavemobile, Cisco and the University of Warwick, with a particular focus on security. He told the event: “5DRIVE will provide a great way for new and old vendors to enter the market with a cost-effective, scalable, secure solution. This will be the first time a private network will be connected using a new architecture.”

>> David Owens

ARI-5G

A collaboration between Telet, AccelerComm and cellXica, this is a project to build the M5Q, a small British-developed, designed and produced cell aimed at the new generation of small networks.

It will use leading-edge firmware to maximise energy efficiency and lower running costs. One of the experimental aspects will be the ability to manage frequencies in a collaborative process with other cells in the area to provide maximum spectral efficiency, opening the way to new licensing models.

>> Andrew Miles, Julia Cordall, Peter Gradwell

Comporan

ARI-5G, or Accelerating RAN intelligence in 5G, has a goal to test and measure performance of 5G RAN in lab. It will concentrate energy efficiency, spectral efficiency and interference management. The project is looking to engage mobile operators to help them lower running costs. It is also looking to work with developers to try to reduce their physical dependency of networks and come up with great xApps and RF use cases. Led by the Telecom Infra Project, there is an emphasis on open networks: “We want to establish multivendor open RAN That is about being interoperable, interchangeable and integrable.”

>> Osman Taher

Graham Currier, Chief Operating Officer of Dense Air, explained that the CoMP-O-RAN project is built around small cells that co-operate, working together to extend the range of individual components. Glasgow University is writing the algorithms with partners Blu Wireless on mmWave, Airspan on 5G NR, and Radisys on the software stack. Currier recognised that the result has to work economically as well as technically. He explained: “We have labs already constructed, lab work starting, and field trials will be held at Millbrook Proving Ground.”

>>

Graham Currier

DU-Volution

The “Distributed Unit” or DU performs signal processing, converting radio signals to data traffic that can then be transported by to the core network infrastructure.

Working principally with UK-based vendors, it will integrate products into an operational Distributed Unit component that is ready for deployment in 5G networks.

Led by ADVA Optical Networking, the consortium comprises AccelerComm and CommAgility, both of whom are experts in the deepest level of cell architecture, along with BT and the University of York.

Scotland 5G Centre provides a project management function of co-ordination and leading collaboration with other projects and organisations.

Testing of the DU will initially be conducted at labs in the North of England supported by ADVA UK, with later testing taking place at BT’s Adastral Park facility.

>> Abigail Elcock, Eric Dowek

Ecoran

Flex 5G

Ecoran, or energy-efficient cloudlets for open radio access network, is building energyefficient processing that connects servers in cellular passive optical network which it refers to as CPON.

By applying machine learning the architecture reduces the energy by 82 per cent. The infrastructure provides 100 times faster interconnection between servers, and 60 times faster intensive computations by eliminating the hierarchy of switches used in the centre architectures. If deployed worldwide the reduction in emissions would be equivalent to those of a country the size of Greece.

Key to this is reducing the underutilisation of resources within data centre. The project is talking to Rolls-Royce, Jaguar and Ford and Nissan, and working closely with the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.

>> Abdelrahman Elgamal, Azza Eltraify, Sanaa Mohamed

The biggest project in terms of partners, Flex 5G brings together systems integrators AWTG, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile O2, along with Zain from Saudi Arabia.

The roll call adds Lime Microsystems, University of Surrey 5G..6GIC, CommScope, Viavi, Emirates ICT Innovation Center (EBTIC), Amazon Web Services and Cambridgeshire County Council. As one might expect it’s an ambitious project building and combining the components for a full 5G Standalone network. With a mix of partners ranging from a silicon supplier to hardware providers, as well as those who provide the novel algorithms and the software solutions that sits on top along with the eventual customers for depolyement: the organisations that could test those and verify the applicability of these types of solutions out in the field it’s an end-to-end programme for building, testing and using a full 5G network.

>> Colin Bryce, Karolis Kiela, Marcin Filo

Open Ran Arts

Swindon-based AceAxis, in partnership with MAC Limited, will build a Future RAN Advanced Test system, for use by radio network equipment vendors who are designing, building and testing 5G Future RAN radios.

AceAxis has a long history in designing and building cells, often licensing those designs to major vendors. Through its work, building both radio heads and distributed units, the company has learnt a lot about working to EU and Open RAN standards.

The consortium is using this expertise to build test equipment for the wider industry. It hopes that this will lower the barriers to entry for smaller vendors and help grow the open RAN community.

Future RAN interfaces are clearly defined. Using these interfaces, along with 3GPP definitions, provides the opportunity for the Open RAN Advanced Test System to become a trusted industry standard for developing 5G radios.

>> Choong Wong, Steve Cooper

Open RAN GaN

The GaN in the name is Gallium Arsenide, a compound semiconductor that has some advantages over silicon for making chips. It provides faster switching and handles power better, but cannot be used for making central processing units.

In mobile device design, GaN is an important technology. And there is a facility for making the chips near Newcastle. The project is working to repurpose designs for radar. The project is led by INEX Microtechnology, working with Custom Interconnect, Viper RF and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult.

The current chip shortage is forecast to last at least 10 years and to worsen. Having UK-supplied chips is essential for national security. The project will develop Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits, or MMICs, to remove the threat of supply shortages.

The consortium is particularly looking to supply its components to other projects developing products as part of FRANC.

>> Andrew Stokes, Andrew Whitworth, John Boston, Roger Carline, Andrew Thomas

O-RANOS

This project is creating an architectural blueprint for multi-domain public and private 5G networks with multi-vendor integration, interoperability and satellite backhaul.

The partners are Cellnex Connectivity Solutions and working with the University of Bristol, Attocore, Weaver Labs, Satellite Applications Catapult and Parallel Wireless.

Cellnex has extensive experience of working with the major mobile network operators to install private networks, including at the Etihad stadium, on the Brighton mainline and at Bristol port.

Andrew Thomas from Cellnex explained: “Our impact in the market is to create use cases to demonstrate that network resources can be shared between a public MNO and private network.”

The project will use novel backhauling and neutral hosting services with a particular focus on satellite backhaul (mainly GEO and LEO constellations) for connecting to different core vendors. The team is looking to work with developers to exploit its framework for secure xApps running on the platform.

>> Andrew Thomas, Ashweeni Beeharee, Jeff Land

Proteus

Secure 5G

Towards AI

This project uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, along with the latest advances in cloud technology to optimise the network more efficiently.

The ability to swap components in and out of the design of a mobile phone base station adds flexibility, reduces the build cost and, most importantly, adds to the security of the supply chain. But it’s not usually possible. Cells are designed around a particular chip and changing that would require a ground-up redesign.

Justin Sims, a systems engineer from Parallel Wireless, explained that Proteus is a project to abstract the specifics of chip-level components from the overall design. He explained that initially this was for x86-type chips but that an ARM based PCI accelerator card was the next step. The programme is looking to demonstrate that performance is not impacted by the abstraction layer.

The consortium is led by Parallel Wireless with ARM, BT, the University of Bristol, Wireless Excellence and Real Wireless.

>> Hamid Falaki

The consortium will develop a full 5G Open RAN platform that uses Software -Defined Radio to produce a signal across a wider range of frequencies, up to 10 GHz, than is typically available.

The project will deliver an innovative solution for Open RAN, which will reduce costs for owners, break single dependencies, and disaggregate hardware and software.

This will allow infrastructure manufacturers to build more efficient mobile base stations which work across more frequency bands.

Led by the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult, the consortium also comprises Lime Microsystems, Slipstream Engineering Design and quantum cryptography experts Arqit. CSA Catapult is a test and support facility that pulls in many industry experts to provide feedback and advice on direction and progress. Slipstream Design is providing a software-driven and frequency-agnostic power amplifier

Lime Microsystems is offering a highly integrated developed power radio chipset and modules for fully programmable solutions.

The project’s goal is a full platform without the limitations of a traditional vendor.

>> Andy Sellars, Ayan Ghosh, Fatemeh Hoveizavi, Graham Peters, Sally Roberts, Scott Alexander, Simon Maggs

The “Towards AI Powered and Secure Carrier-Grade Open RAN Platform” consortium brings together Metaswitch, which was acquired by Microsoft in July 2020, Intel R&D, Capgemini and the University of Edinburgh.

The programme is looking at pulling together open components from a large number of sources and managing them centrally with a single dashboard.

The integration makes sure there is security running through the whole system. It pulls together core network functions, billing and edge into a single system and uses artificial intelligence to co-ordinate the monitoring.

Adding new functionality should be easy. Bozidar Radunovic, principal researcher at Microsoft Cambridge, told the event that the with the platform “anyone can deploy a grand virtual function on top of the platform without having to do any special configuration”.

He added: “The second goal, also paramount for an open architecture platform, is security. We want to make sure the open platforms and components running on them are secure: the billing process, in terms of attack protection, in terms of the usual security and trust, we have all certain contexts with other platforms in the cloud.”

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OTHING CONCENTRATES the mind more on security than a war in Europe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen heightened awareness of all kinds of threats. These include cyber-attacks and the implications of not being able to get deliveries of equipment the UK needs to maintain its telecommunications networks.

The National Cyber Security Centre is charged with protecting the UK from such dangers. Dr Ian levy, Technical Director, explains: “We are here to make the UK the safest place to live and work online. That’s our tagline. And we do that through all sorts of different things. We’ve got programs to try to upskill children, so the next generation is more digital-literate and

“We’ve got programs to assure people and services so that if you want to buy a consultant in cyber there’s somebody with a solid recommendation and so on, and so on. We’re the national incident management authority. We do 770 incidents a year on average. So about two a day.”

The organisation works closely with Critical National Infrastructure sectors to make sure they are as secure as they need to be for our future reliance. The National Cyber Security Centre is the public face of its parent GCHQ in Cheltenham, and it’s been building relationships with British businesses to help to protect them since it was founded in 2016. A relative newcomer given that GCHQ celebrated its

Levy is affable, open and chatty. Not the “I can’t answer that question” kind of person you might expect from a spook department, but then he started at GCHQ as a mathematician. “I spend a lot of time in GCHQ doing some very interesting things with this job, Technical Director at the NCSC. It’s absolutely the best job in the world,” he says. “I kind of worked my way up through GCHQ, trying to bring a bit of realism to some of the things we’ve done.

“When I started, GCHQ’s security mission was very academic and I think we’ve moved it quite a long way over the past few years to being something that is pragmatic, based in evidence and reality, and actually implementable, which was not always the case with government security. It wasn’t really cognizant of the real-world constraints.”

Protecting telecommunications networks is a responsibility that has grown in importance the more we digitalise our lives and as telecoms has become critical to the functioning of society. Levy explains: “We want to make sure that those networks, whether they be fixed or mobile, are as secure as they need to be: commercially sensible, resilient and robust so that the country can rely on them properly.”

That’s not just protection from hackers. “With DCMS we are trying to diversify some of the product supply, because at the moment we’re overly reliant on a very small number of suppliers, to the point that we are nationally dependent on them. And from a national security point of view, that’s a terrible place to be. We need to better understand how we can shape the markets so there’s more supply. That helps both private networks and public networks, big and small, increased diversity, increased robustness. That’s a key part of our mobile work with DCMS.”

Levy has a proper understanding of the scale of the problem. “I think the chance of us rebuilding Marconi is basically zero, but it’s still about making sure we have the right kind of equipment, the right kind of security wrap around those networks so that they can provide the service we all expect,” he says.

The approach NCSC has taken to supply chain diversity is akin to the one Ofcom has taken to spectrum: not by following established practices and standards but by understanding market needs and pioneering approaches to build a critical mass to ensure equipment is available and secure. “The global market is so big and we are a very, very small part of it,” Levy says. “We have to try to make sure that others demand the same sorts of things as we do, so that we’re not asking for something the rest of the market doesn’t want, but we’re leading the rest of the market to asking for what we want.

“Governments around the world, specifically the UK government, need to engage much better and more deeply with all the vendors and the whole ecosystem for telecoms, because the incentive model has been broken for the past few years. The Telecoms Security Act goes some way to fixing that but the first point of call is for new market vendors to speak to DCMS and Ofcom because they’re going to be the ones who actually enforce the code. When it gets into deep technical stuff, obviously you could come and talk to us and that’s fine. But DCMS and Ofcom to start with.”

LEVY RECOGNISES THAT there is no point in remedying the issue of supply chain security by replacing the equipment with apparatus that increases the vulnerability of the networks to attacks. This is a distinct possibility when you introduce open systems. It’s the role of the

NCSC to oversee the security aspects but by monitoring the situation from the outset there is a path to networks which are both diverse and secure.

“We need more of a group of like-minded companies, entities, countries to help make sure things like the O-RAN alliance are putting out the right sorts of standards,” Levy says. “Because some of the stuff that’s in there at the moment needs some work from the security point of view. We need a plan of making sure that implementing open networking, whether it’s O-RAN or something else, doesn’t reduce the security of the networks we’ve worked so hard to fix.”

It’s a big job, and but Levy sees progress.

“We spent six years getting the new regulation in place and another six years to get a code of practice done. Our open networking starts to develop here. We’re still in trials. It doesn’t do high capacity. It doesn’t do high contention. Doesn’t do low power. It doesn’t do a whole bunch of other things. We’ve got to fix all of those. While that’s happening, we can fix security as well. So, by the time it’s ready for prime time, we’ve got the right stuff in place.”

And the National Cyber Security Centre has experience in implementing industry-wide security schemes. “We did one in the financial services sector with the Bank of England called CBEST, that was about understanding systemic risk across the financial sector.”

CBEST is a framework rather than a recipe. The Bank of England provides an implementation guide, but it’s really about ensuring that firms are tested against realistic threat scenarios generated by qualified threat intelligence providers. Testers engage in scenarios mimicking the most credible attackers, using relevant and up-to-date tactics, techniques and procedures.

It’s something Levy says works well: “Over the past decade it has raised the bar in the financial services sector in an evidence-based way. We have GBEST, which is the government version. TBEST will be the telecoms version. We’ve done some experimental testing and it’s really interesting. That’ll become part of the regulatory regime that Ofcom then enforces.”

The framework, if followed, will ensure that the design of private networks protects the organisations interested and, within a network of networks, the nation. It’s a real threat, and not a new one, as Levy reminds us: “When a foreign power has some sort of control over parts of your telecoms infrastructure, that’s a scary thought. Back in 2018, the Russian state had been attacking telecoms networks in the UK. We explained how people could spot that and how people would kick them out. The Telecoms Code of Practice is all about trying to make that much, much harder for them to succeed, but much easier for people to notice when they do get in and easier to kick them out and limit the blast radius of where they can have an effect.”

MORE SIGNIFICANT IS the banning of Huawei, in which the NCSC took a leading role. Initially the recommendation was that it was safe for 35 per cent of the Radio Access Network to use Huawei radios but that changed when America imposed an embargo on American companies selling chips, and in particular field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs.

When a traditional chip is made its function is fixed, but chips have to be made in huge numbers to be economic. Products like mobile phone base stations are not made in large enough quantities to justify dedicated chips. A way around this is the field-programmable gate array. A chip of building blocks where there are fuses between each one. By blowing fuses in the chip it can be designed to perform the necessary function. When the chips in Huawei went from designs in which the fuses had been blown by an American company to a fully flexible raw design NCSC changed its recommendation.

Levy explains that the NCSC did another analysis and went “Huh! That means that all the assurance work we’ve done around having a safe place to stand and understanding certain things no longer applies. Because if the FPGA is Chinese, instead of US, I don’t trust it anymore. And so the things I can say about the boundary go away.”

He sees the US embargo as having a significant effect on Chinese infrastructure vendors, not just Huawei. “They can’t buy Electronic Design Automation tools, they can’t buy particular IP macroblocks for embedding into their own chips. They can’t even buy things like Broadcom ADSL chips, even though they’re kind of commodity. So that Foreign Direct Product Rule is absolutely swingeing in terms of what it stops them doing.”

The Huawei decision came at the end of decades of back and forth. It wasn’t a matter of looking to block the vendor but if the risk of leaving it in outweighed the management of doing so.

The new, pragmatic NCSC understands that the UK won’t be able to build all the equipment it needs and that you can’t lock down everything. “If the security of your critical infrastructure relies on somebody not shimmying up a lamp post, you’ve probably built it wrong,” says Levy. The risk needs to be managed centrally. “You can design most telecoms networks to be resilient to exploitation. So you control the blast radius.”

That pragmatism extends to looking at the other consequences of requiring more powerful equipment to encrypt signals. Levy explains: “So what does that mean for power consumption? What does it mean for reliability? What does it mean for the operational management of all the keys that have to be done? It’s not just the capital costs, it’s the operating expenditure. If you’ve got 10,000 base stations, you have about 25,000 certificates to manage. How are you going to do that? How many people do you need? And so on and so on and so on. So there’s a real balance that has to be done.”

Thinking about how to solve these problems before there is an urgent need, like a direct foreign attack, means that there is a solution to hand. It’s also about judging what is likely to happen. The European Union put out a research paper on Russian Cyber Attacks on Ukraine and postulated on the reasons why there had been fewer than expected. The Russians released a virus known as NotPetya, which went everywhere, and it fell to the NCSC to deal with it.

But Levy doesn’t hold with the EU view that it was less than expected: “We think they’ve done broadly what we said they’d do. I think it depends what optic you’re looking at, as to how much cyberattack Russia has done. If you’re sat in the Ukraine, it doesn’t feel like little. I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

The ongoing war will make National Cyber Security Centre a very busy place, but, perhaps, if it concentrates people’s minds on security, it will also make some of its education work that little bit easier.