Research Summaries

Back Open-Source Development: Business Case and ROI

Fiscal Year 2021
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Information Sciences
Investigator(s) Mun, Johnathan C.
Sponsor Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific (Navy)
Summary The Gartner Group predicts that $4.2 billion will be invested into a global 5G wireless network infrastructure in 2020-2021. This investment involves upgrades of existing digital cellular network infrastructure, to ensure low latency, higher bandwidth, and greater speed. A major problem in 5G network is that its current radio frequency, radio access, and networks are vulnerable to security attacks. The main root cause of the security problem is the software-defined and virtualized nature of 5G versus more traditional hardware foundations of 3G and 4G LTE mobile communication standards. Theoretically, people with a working knowledge of 4G and 5G networks and a cheap software-defined radio (SDR) can conduct these attacks. A protected and secure method that mitigates any malicious attacks is something that DARPA is working on, in collaboration with Software Radio Systems (Ireland and Spain), Sandia National Labs, Oak Ridge National Labs, Qualcomm, NIWC PAC, and others, to design an open source codebase on 5G protected waveforms to circumvent said vulnerabilities. The open source platform approach will provide close to commercial grade software code, beyond standard lab-based platform requirements, and ready for field deployment. The final open source deliverables will be modular in nature, making it an extensible code base, with a low barrier to entry for others to collaborate and join in the effort under standard contributor license agreements (CLA under standard AGPL paradigm). At the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), we are collaborating with DARPA on researching the value-added proposition as it pertains to cost-benefit analysis of going open source when developing a new protected waveform. The research performed will include a financial and economic justification of the cost savings and value enhancement of pursuing open source as opposed to a closed-proprietary, government-owned and developed waveform. A cradle to grave Total Ownership Cost (TOC), Analysis of Alternatives (AOA) comparing open source versus closed proprietary development, and cost-benefit business case will be developed. The end result will be the validation or falsification of the cost and value justification of pursing an open source codebase. The analysis will be purely analytical and economic in nature, without divulging any of the current work-in-progress engineering perspectives and will be led by Dr. Johnathan Mun, Research Professor at NPS. We will be using traditional decision analytics methods and models, as well as more advanced Monte Carlo simulation modeling and artificial intelligence models for data analysis whenever appropriate, to account for uncertainties, risks, and patterns that may emerge from the data.
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal