Telecommunications Research and Engineering at the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences of the Department of Commerce: Meeting the Nation's Telecommunications Needs (2015)

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Assessment of the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences

The DOC’s NTIA operates ITS, a telecommunications research and engineering laboratory. The committee was tasked to examine the capabilities, performance, resources, and customer needs of ITS. To do this, the committee met with ITS leadership and staff to discuss current and future projects, gathered documentation regarding their various resources, and spoke with a significant number of customers and other stakeholders (listed in Appendix B). This chapter highlights the key work of ITS, opportunities for future telecommunications research and engineering activities, and potential barriers to fulfilling its potential.

CAPABILITIES AND PERFORMANCE

ITS performs important engineering work that contributes to the use and management of spectrum by the government. As the need for spectrum increases, this work can support the transfer of government-held spectrum to privately held spectrum for commercial use. NTIA, which manages government-owned spectrum, and the FCC, which regulates privately held spectrum, have a variety of methods by which they coordinate policies and collaborations. The main mechanism is through collaboration between the Office of Engineering and Technology of the FCC and the OSM within NTIA. These two groups coordinate and collaborate on a variety of spectrum-related efforts, not the least of which involves coordination of federal and commercial spectrum interests.¹ This collaboration often requires technical analysis work, which is frequently carried out, at least in part, by ITS.

ITS has a long history of providing neutral, objective, technically sound knowledge in areas where there may be policy contention. As a result, ITS has been viewed as a trusted agent, a role that is likely to grow even more critical in the future as the need to arbitrate among competing uses of spectrum increases. ITS is one of the few organizations that can credibly provide the type of analysis and testing needed to quantify the magnitude of the interference between spectrum users. This capability is essential to facilitate coexistence and spectrum sharing across a multiplicity of technologies, including wireless LANs, mobile cellular, and radar. Although there are a few other laboratories in DOD and in some commercial enterprises with the resources and knowledge to deploy staff and hardware to a particular site to test/verify interference between users, the combination of expertise, objectivity (i.e. their trusted agent status), and physical resources are exclusive to ITS.

An example of ITS’s valuable technical analysis is its work in support of new FCC policies for the use of the 3.5 GHz band.² This newly created Citizens Broadband Radio Service opens up an additional

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¹ Intergovernmental coordination of spectrum efforts is also completed by the NTIA-led Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee, in which the FCC participates. Additionally, leadership of NTIA and FCC meet multiple times each year to conduct high-level discussions.

² See FCC, “FCC Releases Rules for Innovative Spectrum Sharing in 3.5 GHz Band,” https://www.fcc.gov/document/citizens-broadband-radio-service-ro, accessed October 23, 2015.

100 MHz previously unavailable for commercial use because it was allocated for use by military radars. ITS contributed an important analysis on possibilities for sharing between (1) marine surface and air search radars and long-term evolution (LTE), (2) dedicated short-range radio communications (for intelligent transportation systems) LTE, and (3) Dedicated Short Range Radio and unlicensed national information infrastructure (U-NII) wireless systems. ITS subject-matter experts in propagation studies provided extensive support to OSM and the 3.5 GHz Working Group for propagation prediction.³ Going forward, it is reasonable to expect the need for technical spectrum analysis to increase as bands become more congested.

In addition to ITS being a technical leader in spectrum-related work, it has for many years provided unique technical testing services and technical support to the public safety community in the area of public safety communications and other technologies. For example, ITS provided significant support to public safety vendors moving into the 700 MHz LTE network through a series of CRADAs with manufacturers. These ITS services have been the only objective, non-vendor-driven testing and evaluation services available to the public safety community. This work continues under PSCR, which facilitates the cooperative use of the capabilities of both ITS and CTL to serve the needs of public safety entities.

FINDING: ITS has extensive capabilities in public safety, radio spectrum sensing, propagation modeling, and interference analysis. It is recognized by other government agencies (and to some extent private industry) for its objectivity, expertise, and physical resources; is the historically trusted expert in certain areas of spectrum and communication engineering; and it is an essential provider of these services to government agencies.

RECOMMENDATION: ITS should maintain its capabilities in order to remain a principal provider of instrumentation and spectrum measurement services to other federal agencies and be available to commercial entities to provide services that cannot be found elsewhere.

RESOURCES

Financial Resources

The funding directly appropriated to ITS varies from year to year, but it generally makes up about a third to half of its total budget. The balance comes from cost reimbursement agreements with other federal agencies, work for NTIA’s OSM, and a very small amount from CRADAs and other arrangements with private entities (just $150,000 in total during the past 3 fiscal years).⁴ (See Box 2.1 for further breakdown of funding.) ITS’s capacity to carry out work on a reimbursable basis allows ITS to serve as the principal source of the federal government’s expertise and research on spectrum-related issues. However, the dependence on reimbursable work for much of its annual operating budget limits the ability of ITS to set research priorities. Indeed, ITS staff acknowledged that several recent projects did not align well with ITS’s core mission and were taken on to ensure operational continuity. Simply stated, ITS’s current funding limits their ability to perform the type of research needed to meet the future needs of the telecommunication industry.

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³ E. Drocella, J. Richard, R. Sole, F. Najimy, A Lunday, and P. McKenna, NTIS Technical Report TR-15517: 3.5 GHz Exclusion Zone Analyses and Methodology, 2015, http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/publications/2805.aspx.

⁴ Financial data provided to the committee by Brian Lane, Executive Officer, ITS, June 1, 2015.

ITS’s reimbursable work has sometimes had a major national impact, despite very limited funding. For example, the 3.5 GHz work discussed above was funded primarily by DOD and the Navy. The work had significant national impact but was funded for less than $1 million over 2 years.

A propagation modeling website (PMW) developed by ITS is another example of ITS finding ways to leverage very limited resources to create a tool that is useful to a large set of stakeholders. The PMW is free to use by any government organization. ITS staff anticipates that the cost to maintain the service would only be $50,000 to $100,000 per year. However, the current version incorporates only a small number of propagation models. The value of PMW would significantly increase if additional propagation models were added. The staff wishes to add additional functionality; for example, folding in current government spectrum use to help users identify where new transmitters might interfere with incumbent use. Unfortunately, funding is not available to further increase the effectiveness of the tool.

The PMW also provides an example of ITS building a larger activity starting with a small amount of seed money from NTIA. Several years ago, staff began mapping the radio signals in the area around the Table Mountain Field Site and Radio Quiet Zone, which yielded a proof of concept that one can combine propagation models and geographic information system data to provide plots of single and composite radio coverage. The Joint Warfare Analysis Center began investing in the project in 2008 and continues to fund ITS to add new capabilities. This was followed by additional investments from Fort Meade, the U.S. Army, and the National Weather Service. These investments improved the software and grew the project team at ITS from 2 to 12 members.

The work on 3.5 GHz and the PMW illustrate how customer-funded research can yield national benefit when the activities relate closely to ITS’s core mission. Responding to customer needs is important, but ITS will need to ensure that any work taken on supports its mission and is not taken on simply to ensure that staff or resource positions are maintained.

Technical Expertise and Staffing

In addition to reducing ITS’s ability to be selective about its outside-funded work, limited funding has led to the ITS workforce becoming very lean in the past decade (see Box 2.1 for detailed staffing information), leading to losses in expertise areas. Moreover, given that the majority of the workforce has been in federal service for more than 20 years and are older than 50, ITS anticipates the retirement of 15 employees over the next 5 years—many of them in key roles and/or with unique skills profiles. This

means that ITS stands to lose nearly a quarter of its staff during this period. With current hiring processes, ITS will find it difficult to recruit new staff with the critical expertise that will be lost through attrition.

Further complicating the shortage of staff is the long time required to hire an individual. Without direct-hire authority, all new hires must follow a lengthy hiring process defined and managed by the Office of Personnel Management, a process that can take up to 6 months or longer. By the time the person does finally arrive, the person that they are replacing will be long gone, along with their valuable insights that could have been shared had there been an overlap between the retiring individual and the new member of the team. Even after a new employee is hired, there is a considerable period of assimilation to the government and ITS’s way of doing business, which in total means that the replacement of a skilled employee with a person able to perform similar work can easily take a year, and sometimes much more.

Even when opportunities to hire arise, recruiting and hiring people with the needed expertise is difficult for the following reasons: ITS is unfamiliar to many in industrial and academic organizations; government salary scales are often not competitive; Boulder is located far from the nation’s wireless technology hotbeds such as Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas; and the laboratory can only hire individuals with U.S. citizenship.

Computing and Physical Resources

The hiring of new staff is not the only structural and bureaucratic challenge that ITS faces. ITS faces challenges in purchasing basic computing equipment; for example, the committee learned of a senior manager who had not been assigned a computer for many months. More alarming is that ITS has challenges running the various networks needed to conduct the telecommunication and networking research it is tasked to conduct. For example, in recent years the DOC has mandated that ITS’s research networks comply with Office of Management and Budget rules that are intended for federal enterprise networks, which impose security requirements that appear overly rigid for networks used for research purposes.

ITS also manages and operates a number of other facilities and equipment, including a cell-site-on-wheels vehicle, various radio spectrum measurement vehicles, and a host of networking, computing, radio, radar, and test gear. To stay current, such facilities need regular upgrades and periodic replacement. Procurement is a lengthy process, which limits the ability of staff to replace aging equipment or purchase cutting-edge technology for testing even when funds are available.

ITS also maintains the valuable DOC Table Mountain Field Site and Radio Quiet Zone, which is located 10 miles north of the Boulder laboratory campus and provides a research facility for testing, experimentation, and sensitive measurements of the radio spectrum. The “radio quiet” designation means that state and federal laws restrict or limit radio emissions at and around the site. In addition to ITS, a number of government agencies have made use of Table Mountain, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NIST, NTIA, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Additionally, a small number of nongovernment groups have made use of the facility, including the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Deep Space Exploration Society. The 1,800 acre site, sitting atop of a flat butte, has a broad range of facilities, including the following: a spectrum research laboratory, an open field radio test site, mobile test vehicles, a 10-meter turntable, and two 18.3-meter (60 foot) parabolic antennas.

Expensive to maintain, the Table Mountain facility has gradually fallen into disuse and disrepair and currently hosts only a few experiments. The site potentially holds value for the various work that ITS and other government agencies will need to conduct in coming years, but additional investments will be needed to restore it to full use. Among the many uses, the site could prove instrumental in the testing of new spectrum-sharing technology, evaluation of new propagation and radio channel models, and assessing the potential of interference of new entrant services on incumbent radio systems, just to name a few.

FINDING: Due to limited direct appropriations, ITS relies too heavily on customer-funded projects, including work outside its core mission.

FINDING: ITS staff capacity and capability and financial resources are inadequate for keeping up with future communication, networking, and spectrum research and engineering needs. Without additional resources and updated skills in critical areas, ITS will not be able to effectively identify and perform research and tasks that are essential to furthering advanced communication technologies.

FINDING: The centralization of administrative control has eroded ITS’s capability to perform as a research and engineering laboratory. This includes the ability to nimbly hire staff, procure appropriate equipment, and manage its computer systems.

FINDING: Table Mountain Field Site and Radio Quiet Zone has not been effectively maintained, leading to its underutilization by researchers.

FINDING: Lack of strong leadership over the past decade has left ITS isolated from NTIA, the DOC, and Congress and has contributed to diminished relevance in the commercial world.

FINDING: Unless the DOC supports ITS by (1) facilitating hiring to maintain the organization’s personnel level and increase the overall technical expertise of the staff, (2) encouraging ITS to establish an equipment replacement plan, and (3) supporting the procurement and management of needed technology and resources, including improvements to the table mountain facility, ITS will not be able to effectively manage its laboratories and execute a strategic plan.

MISSION AND STRATEGY

ITS has limited resources, but demanding research and analysis responsibilities will grow as spectrum, public safety, and networking needs become both more urgent and more numerous. ITS needs to make efforts to expand its activities in spectrum-sharing measurement, verification, and so on in support of both military and commercial technologies, leveraging its related ongoing efforts in the public safety space.

Redefine Mission

ITS’s mission includes research that “enhances scientific knowledge and understanding in cutting-edge areas of telecommunications technology” and research that “helps to drive innovation and contributes to the development of communications and broadband policies that enable a robust telecommunication infrastructure.”⁵ Given these broad charges, ITS needs to define a strategic plan that identifies the overall research agenda that must be met and, at the same time, describes the work that they cannot accomplish for reasons of resource or expertise. A strategic planning exercise will allow ITS to define new long-term research directions and identify the skills and equipment it will need to conduct cutting-edge research critical to the nation’s best interest. It will also allow ITS to determine what capabilities it should develop in order to perform core functions in house and what functions would better be left to other industry, university, or government laboratories. Partnerships with universities, staff exchanges with other agencies (i.e., the FCC), and additional laboratory locations may expand the

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⁵ See National Telecommunications and Information Administration, “ITS Mission & History,” http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/about-its/its-mission-history.aspx, accessed October 26, 2015.

capabilities of the laboratory and extend staff expertise while also providing the laboratory with an opportunity to reach a new audience.

A redefined mission may necessitate defunding some current activities to ensure that resources are focused on core research and engineering that aligns with DOC’s mission priorities. It simply is not viable for ITS to continue the breadth of work they now are conducting given the shortage of budget, technical expertise, and equipment. This situation necessitates that ITS focus on a core set of tasks, which should include research, measurement, and testing, and cut other areas. Specific areas that could be considered for discontinuation include the following:

• Nonpublic safety audio and video quality work. If the full cost of the work (salaries, equipment, and overhead) can be reimbursed by federal agencies or private firms, then it might be worth determining if a net positive value justifies the continuation of the work.
• Standard-setting activities not core to the new ITS focus. This may include the cable standards efforts and the related international standards work and broadband wireless standards (outside of public safety communications).
• Information technology services work started under the previous ITS director (discussed in detail in the next section) and administrative office growth.
• High-frequency and very-high-frequency work. HF and VHF work have and continue to have significant value; however, given their applicability to a small number of users, this work could be funded by the U.S. government agencies that still value these bands. ITS should refocus on mm-wave technologies, which are rapidly emerging as key technologies for wireless communications.

Key to ITS’s refocus will be stopping any use of appropriated funds to support areas that will be discontinued and increase the radio propagation and channel-modeling work, which is critical and should be continued and grown. Other key areas will include mm-wave; spectrum sharing, monitoring, and enforcement; development of software tools for spectrum related activities; and systems-level extension of the current radio work.

Build Leadership

Not all failings at ITS can be blamed on lack of funding from NTIA and other sources. A series of leadership challenges within ITS persisted over the past decade and hindered the ability of ITS to accomplish its mission. This resulted in a shift in focus and a decline in areas of traditional strength and core mission. ITS experienced a long transition period of approximately 10 years in the late 1990s where the leadership was misaligned with the mission and strengths of ITS. The long-term inability of ITS leadership to connect with NTIA leadership left ITS less visible and relevant to the larger organization’s mission. More recent leadership took ITS in a direction away from its core strength and mission. There was a thrust to refocus part of the organization to create an information technology services organization for the rest of the U.S. government, which diverted funding away from core strengths and vital functions such as spectrum measurement and modeling.

For the past year, ITS has been without a director, exacerbating the problems discussed above. However, the committee is optimistic that with new leadership in place ITS can refocus on its traditional strengths and rebuild programs in spectrum and telecommunications, its key mission areas. The new ITS director will need to assess how funds are currently used within the organization and restructure funding to ensure that mission-critical tasks are adequately funded.

Assessing and Prioritizing Research

ITS currently assesses and prioritizes its work informally through recently established or reestablished discussion forums, such as the International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies⁶ and the newly formed CAC. Such informal gatherings are no substitute for a well-defined process and clear metrics for evaluating past, current, and future work. A well-defined assessment process is necessary to ensure that very limited appropriated funds are directed to the highest-priority areas and to ensure that ITS only accepts appropriate, mission-relevant work on a reimbursable basis.

A formal advisory board consisting of government, industry, and academic experts could review recent, current, and anticipated ITS activities. The board could suggest new directions as well as work to be deemphasized. In addition to helping ITS best align its efforts with its mission, the board would raise the institute’s visibility with positive effects on recruiting of new staff and attracting relevant contract work. The CTL Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology, which is described in the report Telecommunications Research and Engineering at the Communications Technology Laboratory: Meeting the Nation’s Telecommunications Needs,⁷ could be a model for an ITS advisory board.

Maintain Trusted Agent Status

There is a critical need for the government to maintain a trusted capability with which it can evaluate vendor claims for new spectrum-sharing techniques and technology, and ITS—if adequately funded and staffed—could be able to provide this capability moving forward. In particular, new methodologies for verifying spectrum sharing as well as violation of sharing policies are required. As the need for objective information on spectrum reallocation and interference grows, the demand for a third-party to conduct objective testing will grow. Over 3 years, the Department of Homeland Security and various organizations within DOD provided the funding for a significant portion of ITS total budget. Given its strong reliance on reimbursable funding, an overreliance on one or two customers puts at risk ITS’s trusted agent status. One way to grow the customer base is to attract additional private-sector customers.

Increase Visibility in the Private Sector

While ITS is well known within the government, its work is less known within the private sector. Expanding ITS’s private customer base would expand its relevance and connectivity to real world problems and challenges. ITS will need to make a concerted effort to engage with the private sector about its capabilities. This engagement includes broad publication of R&D results and activities, as well as participation in—via organization of and speaking at—technical meetings related to such research. This can be done through increased presence at important technology standards organizations, participation in valuable research, and contributions to peer-reviewed publications and conferences.

ITS will also need to attract additional private sector and government customers. While the customers the committee interviewed spoke highly of ITS’s work, the majority expressed concerns over the lengthy process to establish an official relationship. ITS and the DOC will need to develop processes that allow for quicker formal agreements between the organization and customers. If Boulder, Colorado, can become a center of telecommunication research that is valued by both government and industry, various other

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⁶ See the International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies website at http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/isart/isart-home.aspx, accessed October 26, 2015.

⁷ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Telecommunications Research and Engineering at the Communications Technology Laboratory: Meeting the Nation’s Telecommunications Needs, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2015.

private and nongovernmental organizations may gravitate to the area, increasing both the hiring pool and coordination around research challenges.

ITS participates in several standards organization within the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and PSCR is quite active in standards-setting organizations relevent to its work. However, ITS has participated little in the networking and cellular industry standards-settings bodies such as the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee (developing technologies commonly known as Ethernet, Wi-Fi, etc.), 3GPP,⁸ or IETF. Yet each of these organizations is responsible for producing the technical specifications that have enabled the current Internet and mobile cellular infrastructures connecting billions of end users. They are aggressively working to develop the next generation of specifications that will result in new products and services over the next 10 years.

Further, given that part of ITS is funded through appropriation and its mission is to enhance scientific knowledge and understanding of telecommunications technology, it is reasonable for ITS to disseminate its research findings through technical reports, peer reviewed journals, contributions to standards bodies, as well as making available software and other tools for establishing measurement standards and processes in communications.

RECOMMENDATION: ITS should develop a strategic plan that identifies the overall research agenda needed to fulfill its mission and create a formal process to ensure that its activities are aligned with its mission, strategy, and national priorities.

RECOMMENDATION: ITS should seek out opportunities to engage in cooperative research and development with industry and academia and expand ITS connections to industry problems and challenges and encourage staff to participate in key standards organizations, attend key research conferences, and increase contributions to peer-reviewed publications.

RECOMMENDATION: ITS and the Department of Commerce should develop processes that allow for quicker formal agreements between the organization and ITS customers so that ITS can quickly address industry and government needs.

RECOMMENDATION: ITS should establish an advisory board consisting of government, industry, and academic experts to review ITS activities and suggest changes in direction to help ITS best align its work with its mission.

RECOMMENDATION: ITS leadership should communicate regularly with National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Department of Commerce, and Congress on how its current research priorities and work supports NTIA’s mission and national priorities.

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⁸ The 3rd Generation Partnership Project “unites [seven] telecommunications standard development organizations” in Europe, the United States, and Asia. “The project covers cellular telecommunications network technologies.” See “About 3GPP Home,” http://www.3gpp.org/about-3gpp/about-3gpp, accessed August 17, 2015.