The Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) Aether platform designed for 5G edge cloud capabilities has been selected as the software layer for a new $30 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The agency’s Pronto project, which supports research for secure 5G network infrastructure, is also funding ONF to deploy and operate an Aether network as a managed service, said Timon Sloane, VP of marketing at ONF.

“That’s part of the model. Not just creating a raw open source platform, it’s actually to build and operate a network,” he said.

The Kubernetes-based open source project that ONF released in March combines multiple services, including edge cloud, mobile edge computing, and open radio access network (RAN) technology, to deliver 5G and LTE as a private edge cloud service for enterprises. Aether, pronounced “ether,” is the first open source edge cloud platform and the first open platform supporting connectivity as a service, according to Sloane.

The funding for DARPA’s Pronto project will also be used to support research in network verification and closed-loop control by Cornell University, Princeton University, and Stanford University. Aether’s commercial partners include AT&T, Ciena, Intel, Google, NTT, and Telefónica. 

“Pronto is focused on building networks, that are end-to-end programmable from the server to the NIC, to the switches, middleboxes, the whole end-to-end path, making it truly programmable,” Sloane said.

That level of programmability allows IT professionals to “monitor every packet in every flow in the network. Today’s networks, traditional networks are really like these black boxes. You send packets and you hope they come out the other side, and if they don’t you really have no idea what happened,” he said.

“With Aether and Pronto and this approach we can actually track every single packet and flow that we want to target and determine every single forwarding rule, everything is touched all the way through. So it’s really peeling back and making it possible to really understand how the network’s behaving,” Sloane added.

ONF is already running a beta production deployment of Aether supporting Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum and 4G LTE radio access in a shared core running in Google Cloud. The network will be extended to the university campuses to advance Pronto research and explore potential use cases, according to ONF.

“The real goal and thinking here is for Aether to really take us toward the future of a secure 5G infrastructure where one can build secure networks on insecure white box hardware,” Sloane said. “It’s not the hardware that defines the behavior of the network, it’s the program and the operator’s software definition for how the network should behave. As we get there, we believe that networks become substantially more secure and hopefully a lot of the security concerns that have been discussed quite a lot of late will get mitigated to some degree. That’s our hope and ambition.”

Moreover, because Aether provides a cloud-native Kubernetes environment it can also support simultaneous Kubernetes-based services, including those from public cloud or IoT providers from each edge site, he said. 

While ONF has various separate projects, Aether is an attempt to bring multiple capabilities together to simplify private edge cloud operations for enterprises.