ITS: The Nation’s Spectrum and Communications Lab

Our mission is to ADVANCE innovation in communications technologies, INFORM spectrum and communications policy for the benefit of all stakeholders, and INVESTIGATE our Nation’s most pressing telecommunications challenges through research that employees are proud to deliver. Learn more about ITS on our YouTube Channel or read about our research programs in the Technical Progress Report.

ITS is hosting a RIC Forum!

In collaboration with U.S. Department of Defense FutureG & 5G Office, ITS is hosting a RIC Forum March 27–28, 2024, where radio access network (RAN) Intelligent Controller (RIC) Application (App) vendors and universities can demonstrate viable RIC Apps and their use cases for the purposes of technical knowledge sharing. Presenters will showcase authentic RIC App demonstrations (not simulations) that measure and display the effects of their xApps or rApps on a 5G Open RAN network. Click here for more details ...

News

Shining a Spotlight on ITS Interns

September 1, 2023

Employment opportunities at ITS include internships for students at all levels of their scholastic careers. Like other employment opportunities, when openings exist, these are listed on ...

New ITS Contributions Supporting International Radio Standards Continue One-hundred-year-old Tradition

May 25, 2023

Until June 2, 2023, expert researchers from ITS are in Geneva, Switzerland, where they are collaborating with colleagues from all over the world to reach consensus about improvements to the International Telecommunication...

New First-of-Its-Kind Report Provides Analysis of Early CBRS Deployment Data

May 1, 2023

Today ITS released the report “ An Analysis of Aggregate CBRS SAS Data from April 2021 to January 2023,”...

Recent Publications

NTIA Technical Memo TM-23-569: COCRID: A Challenging Optical Character Recognition Image Dataset August 2023, Robert Grosso; Margaret H. Pinson. This memorandum provides technical details for the image quality experiment COCRID: A Challenging Optical Character Recognition Dataset. The design goals of the COCRID dataset are (1) to train no-refe...
NTIA Technical Memo TM-23-568: 5G Challenge Preliminary Event: Evaluating Modular, Interoperable, Multi-Vendor, Open RAN Solutions May 2023, Margaret H. Pinson; Mark Poletti; Julie E. Kub; Jeremy Glenn; Tim Thompson; Robert Kupsh; Naser Areqat; Okmar Dharmadhikari; Annie George; T. Lauriston Hardin; Cory Johnson; Spiros Kapoulas; Sundar Sriram. Today’s mobile wireless networks comprise many proprietary solutions with custom, closed-source software and hardware. Changes to these proprietary elements require complex and meticulous verification...

This Month in ITS History

September 1962: Canadian Satellite Allouette Launched from Point Aguella, CA

On September 29, 1962, the world’s first top-side ionospheric sounding satellite was launched from Point Aguella Missile Range in California. Top-side sounding allows researchers to probe the ionosphere from above, in much the same way that researchers have explored it from the ground, using reflected radio waves. These readings improve ionospheric maps, which are essential for radio communications, and help scientists understand the charged layers of the atmosphere that reflect and scatter radio waves. Allouette (French for lark) was constructed at Canada’s Defence and Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) by a team headed by scientist John Chapman. DRTE joined with the UK’s Radi ...