Proceedings Article | 3 May 2017
KEYWORDS: Telecommunications, Data communications, Standards development, Software development, Sensors, Java, Internet, Sensor networks, Defense technologies, Control systems, Computing systems, Embedded systems, Intelligent sensors, Adaptive control
While the term Internet of Things (IoT) has been coined relatively recently, it has deep roots in multiple other areas of
research including cyber-physical systems, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, embedded systems, mobile ad-hoc
networks, wireless sensor networks, cellular networks, wearable computing, cloud computing, big data analytics, and
intelligent agents. As the Internet of Things, these technologies have created a landscape of diverse heterogeneous
capabilities and protocols that will require adaptive controls to effect linkages and changes that are useful to end users. In
the context of military applications, it will be necessary to integrate disparate IoT devices into a common platform that
necessarily must interoperate with proprietary military protocols, data structures, and systems. In this environment, IoT
devices and data will not be homogeneous and provenance-controlled (i.e. single vendor/source/supplier owned). This
paper presents a discussion of the challenges of integrating varied IoT devices and related software in a military
environment. A review of contemporary commercial IoT protocols is given and as a practical example, a middleware
implementation is proffered that provides transparent interoperability through a proactive message dissemination system.
The implementation is described as a framework through which military applications can integrate and utilize
commercial IoT in conjunction with existing military sensor networks and command and control (C2) systems.
