SpS2 – Military Applications of IoT

Date:  Monday, 5 February 2018
Time:  13:30-15:30 & 16:00-18:00
Room: 4302

Call for Papers

Modern military operations are conducted in a complex, multidimensional, highly dynamic and disruptive environment – sometimes with unanticipated partners and irregular adversaries. Military commanders operate under strong time pressures and high operational tempos. Commanders have increasingly shorter timeframes to obtain an accurate assessment of the situation, to assess potential courses of action, and to make decisions. Furthermore, they need to draw from all possible sources to ensure that the most complete and relevant picture can be created of the situation, in near real-time, and understand the implications of their decisions and courses of action.

One response to these challenges is to introduce the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) into the military domain. The Internet of Things is extensively developed world-wide with a focus on civilian applications. IoT is a paradigm that considers the pervasive presence of a variety of smart things/objects in the environment. By means of wireless and wired connections, they are able to interact and cooperate with each other to create new applications/services in orderto reach common goals. Objects/things make themselves recognizable and can behave intelligently by making context related decisions thanks to information aggregation and sharing with other objects. Furthermore, they can be components of complex services. However, the integration of heterogeneous sensors and systems diverse in technology, environmental constraints, and levels of fidelity is a challenging issue not only for military organizations.

Modern military equipment is expected to be increasingly equipped with processing and communication capabilities, which can be employed to inspect or modify the status of the equipment. To some extent, the equipment could be regarded as sensors or actuators and integrated into the rest of the military information infrastructure. Physical and virtual military things have identities, physical attributes, virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and should be seamlessly integrated into the military information network. In order to accomplish full integration, the relevant security mechanisms, protocol adaptions, and scalability properties must be provided. The possible outcome of this integration is a wider set of sensors and information for use in situation awareness applications, medical information applications, transport and logistics applications, etc. The technical topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Scenarios for use of IoT in military environment such as smart bases that incorporate commercial IoT technologies in buildings, facilities, etc., force protection at bases as well as maritime and littoral environments, health and personnel monitoring, monitoring and justin-time equipment maintenance.
• Smart city monitoring and leveraging services in smart city environments for disaster response and other activities.
• Applications of IoT technologies to support tactical reconnaissance.
• Architectural aspects of military IoT infrastructure, including security, information, and communication architectures, work flow / business processes, interoperability and Integration of disparate technologies.
• Examples of physical instantiations of military IoT systems built from commercially available elements and architectures.
• Information management challenges for military application of IoT – trustworthiness, pedigree, provenance, and enabling military commanders and missions to benefit from IoT generated information.
• Security challenges related to co-existence and interconnection of military and civilian IoT networks.
• Challenges related to reliability and dependability, especially when IoT becomes mission critical.
• Zero-configuration or other approaches to simplify the deployment and configuration of IoT, especially in coalition settings where disparate IoT resources need to coexist and interoperate.
• Knowledge discovery, including semantic and syntax discovery of information provided by IoT.
• Challenges related to actuation of IoT devices, especially with real-time requirements
• Power challenges for tactically deployed IoT devices.