Project Pronto Hits Major Milestones, New Leadership

[Michelle Roth]

Project Pronto: Celebrating One-Year Anniversary

It has been an exciting year of innovation, collaboration and forward momentum since the launch of Project Pronto. A year ago, we embarked upon building and deploying an end-to-end 5G connected edge cloud. This project leverages a fully programmable network empowered by unprecedented visibility, verification and closed-loop control capabilities to fuel innovation while helping to secure future network infrastructure. The project also utilizes ONF’s Aether as the foundational platform for the project.

Recently, we achieved the successful completion of the first Phase by successfully bringing Stanford Flight Lab onto the network, where we are running automated drone swarm control leveraging a private cellular network, with hardening, security and DoS protections built right into the network. The Pronto team released videos that use drones flying in formation to demonstrate how verification and closed loop control showcase and create a more resilient and secure network. For example, drones experiencing a DoS attack are to recover normal operation automatically in less than 1 second. The demos clearly highlight how Project Pronto is addressing some of the biggest security challenges of 5G. Read More

You may have heard that Nick McKeown has transitioned into a senior leadership role at Intel. Nick will remain involved in Pronto in an advisory capacity, but in his place Sachin Katti will be stepping in to lead Project Pronto.  

Many of you may already know Sachin. In addition to being a professor at Stanford, his start-up Uhana was acquired by VMware in 2019. He is also on the leadership team of the O-RAN Alliance, and was the founder of xRAN (a precursor to O-RAN). Sachin has a rich history of identifying the toughest technical challenges in both wired and mobile networking and then creating organizations to solve them. Welcome Sachin!