The Department of National Defence (DND) is looking for ideas that can help resolve a key technology issue they face with modern mobile communications.
Canadian companies, nonprofit organizations, institutions, and even individuals are invited to put forward their thoughts and plans as part of the Government of Canada’s Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program. IDEaS solicits proposals for solutions to pressing issues in the defence and public safety field, using Canadians’ “knowledge and concepts to enhance defence capability, create an economic impact, and ultimately, to build an innovation ecosystem for national defence”.
Rewards depend on a solution’s “Technology Readiness Level (TRL)”, which measures how much development will be needed before a solution can be deployed. Lower TRLs (TRL 1-3) are eligible for up to $250,000 for a period of up to six months for “solution development”, according to DND. The design phase of TRL 4-5 can receive up to $1.5 million in funding for up to 12 months, while the build phase (TRL 6-9), has up to $5 million available for building and testing prototypes.
This is a competitive process, and various solutions and designs can be commissioned for development, which are winnowed down to a few (or even one) build phase candidate.
Developing seamless mobile connections
For this particular IDEaS challenge, the problem that they’re attempting to address is mobile connectivity.
The challenge is called “Stay connected: Seamless transitions between mobile broadband networks”. The issue they identified is in having military and public safety vehicles and personnel using 4G and 5G mobile broadband networks — the same kind that Canadians use every day on their cell phones. The announcement notes that public safety and defence have “critical needs for resilient, secure, interoperable, and ubiquitous communications to support operations in complex environments”, and that these are often “stringent and unique communications needs extend beyond those of commercial users.”
While they benefit from the use of standard 4G or 5G mobile broadband, they face a potentially serious problem: handoff. As most people know, cell signals require the use of towers, and as you travel a mobile device will need to switch from tower to tower on the fly. In situations where one network doesn’t have a tower, the phone signal will sometimes need to move over to a different network that does have available towers. This requires reauthentication to each network by the user, and that momentary reauthentication can cause a hitch or gap in the signal as it moves from one to the other.
Civilians usually don’t notice it, both because there’s often a lot of towers where civilians live and they’re usually not sensitive to serious disruption. At most, they might have to pay for a “roaming” connection. But for military and public safety applications, these hitches can prove to be a potentially serious problem; they’re often on the move and are often in situations where, as the IDEaS announcement put it, “continuous, uninterrupted communications is of the utmost importance.”
The constantly repeated cycles of reconnection simply won’t cut it, and so IDEaS is looking for new solutions.
In particular, they seem to be looking for solutions that allow for “session persistence”, which would “enable uninterrupted connectivity while devices hand off from one PLMN ID network to another in a seamless manner.” Presumably, this would involve connecting to multiple networks simultaneously, so that there’s a consistent “overlap” in connectivity, though the announcement wasn’t specific in that respect.
Essential and desired outcomes for IDEaS
What the IDEaS announcement did say was that they had several essential and desired outcomes.
The essential outcomes are ensuring configuration for both “core network to core network” and “radio access network”, as well as addressing “network interworking scenarios that deliver session persistence (service continuity) between distinct Third Generation Partnership Project based (3GPP-based) mobile broadband networks.” This will, they said, “allow for defence, security, and public safety users to experience full user connectivity in a complex multi-network mobile broadband communications environment.”
The desired outcomes were “network interworking with session persistence” between the following types of connections:
- Between distinct 5G networks.
- Between distinct 5G and private (non-commercial) 5G networks.
- Between distinct 4G and 5G networks.
- Between distinct 4G and private (non-commercial) 5G networks.
- Between Internet of Things (IoT) machine-type communications (fixed or mobile) and 5G.
- Between terrestrial-based 4G networks and Low Earth Orbit (LEO)-based 5G networks.
- Between terrestrial-based 5G networks and LEO-based 5G networks.
These last two are especially interesting, as they appear to be intent on leveraging the direct space-to-smartphone connections that have been profiled in recent SpaceQ coverage. They may also refer to seamless connection between terrestrial 4G/5G networks and high-speed LEO networks like Telesat Lightspeed, Starlink and Eutelsat Oneweb, which could become critically important for operations and maneuvers in remote locations.
The deadline to submit proposals is March 27th, 2025, at 2:00 PM EST. For more information, there is a solicitation guide on Canadabuys.ca.
