The Internet of Battlefield Things

At this point, it feels like every industry is attempting to coin their own Internet of Things (IoT) spinoff to address the unique challenges they face: the Internet of Aircraft Things, the Internet of Space Things, and the Internet of Mining Things among others. The U.S Army, which recognized the potential impacts of IoT on its operations almost from the beginning, has gone with the moniker Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) to describe its current research toward developing integrated IoT solutions for the wars of the future.

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is the Army’s primary link between the scientific and military communities, and is responsible for managing and integrating new science and technology assets to fulfil identified capability gaps. ARL is preparing to award up to a million dollars in grants to civilian research partners for a one year Collaborative Research Alliance on the IoBT. ARL’s request for proposals highlights four key areas of IoT research that hint at the direction the Army is looking to go:

1. Discovery, Composition, and Adaptation of Goal-Driven Heterogeneous IoBTs– the scalable composition and management of a diverse set of “things” towards multiple dynamic mission goals.
2. Autonomic IoBTs to Enable Intelligent Services- developing automated and dynamic solutions that support a command and control system on the fly.
3. Distributed Asynchronous Processing and Analytics of Things- developing solutions for integrating and analyzing diverse sets of information of varied quality and composition to augment goal-driven decision making.
4. Cyber-Physical Security– ensuring resiliency of the above against tampering, adversarial compromise, and enemy attack to provide bounded guarantees of performance.

These research areas highlight many of the critical challenges facing the implementation of IoT solutions on the battlefield. The first points to the challenge of integrating signals from a diverse and dynamic set of sensors, including static ground sensors, aircraft, drones, satellites, and individual soldiers. This is further compounded by the challenge of integrating legacy systems not designed with IoBT in mind that are forecast to remain in the Army inventory through 2050. While this constrains the ways in which certain assets can be used in support of IoBT, research conducted by Lockheed Martin for the Air Force on integrating information sharing systems between legacy F-22 aircraft and the F-35 demonstrates the potential for legacy systems to play a role in IoBT. The second and third research areas point to the inherent difficulty in implementing networked solutions on the battlefield. An IoBT network will need to be able to adapt autonomously to changing conditions and capable of handling incomplete or contradictory information in order to help commanders make their decisions. The most daunting challenge comes from the fact that IoBT systems present new vulnerabilities from a security perspective and would likely become high priority targets for evolving electronic warfare and cyber capabilities from potential adversaries. The IoBT network will need to be resilient in the face of combat losses, electronic jamming, deception operations, and a host of other threats.

Partnership with allied militaries presents an additional challenge.  Toward this end, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Information Systems Technology Panel has been conducting its own research on the military applications of the Internet of Things since the beginning of 2016, and the program is currently slated to continue through the end of 2018. One of the key challenges outlined by this panel is the integration of IoT technologies with the existing military communications architecture used by the alliance, which directly echoes ARL’s concerns on integrating legacy equipment with future IoBT systems. Many NATO members do not have the resources to upgrade to the newest systems, especially in an area as dynamic as IoT, so the solutions adopted by both the U.S and NATO will need to address this reality.

Although IoBT is in its infancy, the Army has already implemented several IoT solutions to date, both on the battlefield and in garrison. As part of its environmental efforts, the Army has installed over 8,000 smart meters connected to integrated management systems that have helped the service reduce energy consumption by 23% since 2002 and water use by 27% since 2007.  Persistent sensors that detect vibration, light, sound, and other signals are employed to protect forward operating bases in combat environments, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently working on developing the next generation of passive ground sensors to integrate in to a larger network of smart situational awareness devices. These innovations are only the beginning of the revolution in the Internet of Battlefield Things.