Sustainment of Military Operations by 5G and Cloud/Edge Technologies

We present military use cases that have the potential of supporting Sustainment functions through the use of 5G enabling technologies, especially edge computing, that have been developed to support civilian use cases. Specifically personnel training enhanced by augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR), healthcare, and logistics use cases, referred together as Sustainment functions, have analogous military utilities especially in permissive electromagnetic (EM) threat environments. The unique nature of military applications presents challenges similar in some respects, but additive in others for areas such as privacy, security, network architecture, and quality of services. The military need for potential operations together with forces from other nations in case of allied joint operations will necessitate enhanced interoperability. In this paper, we aim to address these aspects from the perspective of 5G and trends in future technologies.