User:Weebly90/sandbox

Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT)

The Internet of things (IoT) is revolutionizing the management and control of automated systems leading to a paradigm shift in areas, such as smart homes, smart cities, health care, and transportation. The IoT technology is also envisioned to play an important role in improving the effectiveness of military operations in battlefields. The interconnection of combat equipment and other battlefield resources for coordinated automated decisions is referred to as the Internet of battlefield things (IoBT). IoBT networks are significantly different from traditional IoT networks due to battlefield specific challenges, such as the absence of communication infrastructure, heterogeneity of devices, and susceptibility to cyber-physical attacks. The combat efficiency and coordinated decision-making in war scenarios depends highly on real-time data collection, which in turn relies on the connectivity of the network and information dissemination in the presence of adversaries.

Background
The Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that allows the interconnection of devices which are equipped with electronic sensors and actuators. It allows for a higher level of situational awareness and effective automated decisions without human intervention. The concept has proven to be extremely useful in applications such as smart homes, energy management, smart cities, transportation, health care, and other domains. Recently, there is an interest in the defence community to leverage the benefits enabled by the IoT to improve the combat efficiency in battlefields and effectively manage war resources, ,. This emerging area of using IoT technology for defence applications is being referred to as the Internet of battlefield things (IoBT), , . Fig. 1 illustrates a typical battlefield comprising of heterogeneous objects, such as soldiers, armoured vehicles, and aircrafts, that communicate with each other amidst cyber-physical attacks from the enemy.

Applications
The IoBT has the potential to completely revolutionize modern warfare by using data to improve combat efficiency as well as reduce damages and losses by automated actions while reducing the burden on human war-fighters. Currently, the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems use millions of sensors deployed on a range of platforms to provide situational awareness to military commanders and troops, on the ground, seas, and in the air. However, the real power lies in the interconnection of devices and sharing of sensory information that will enable humans to make useful sense of the massive, complex, confusing, and potentially deceptive ocean of information. In the battlefield scenarios, the communications between strategic war assets such as aircrafts, warships, armoured vehicles, ground stations, and soldiers can lead to improved coordination, which can be enabled by the IoBT. However, to become a reality, this vision will have to overcome several technical limitations of current information systems and networks.

Most civilian IoT applications such as smart homes and cities are infrastructure based, where the devices are connected to each other and the internet via an access point or gateway. In the battlefield scenario, the communication infrastructure such as cellular networks or base stations may not be available. Hence, the battlefield things need to exploit device-to-device (D2D) communications to share information with other things. Therefore, the information sharing can be affected by the physical parameters of the network such as the transmission power of the things, the number of deployed things, their locations, and the flexibility of communication with other types of things. In addition to these factors, another impediment in the connectivity of battlefield things is the susceptibility to cyber-physical attacks. The information exchange between things may be affected by several factors such as jamming of radio frequency (RF) channels, physical attacks on infrastructure, node failures due to attacks on power sources, or lack of power, etc. Since the analytics and automated decisions in an IoBT network rely on the real-time data provided by the sensors deployed in the battlefield, we need to ensure the spread of information in the networks with a certain level of reliability and security to make accurate decisions.

Although the IoBT has to do to with much more beyond the connectivity of battlefield things, such as digital analytics and automated response, which allows the systems to react more quickly and precisely than humans; however, the connectivity aspect is vital in allowing the IoBT systems to unleash their full potential. It is ideal if we can achieve complete situational awareness and perfect information spreading throughout the network. However, due to limited available resources, incurred costs (capital and operational), and vulnerability to attacks, it is not practical and hence requires a cost-effective, secure and reconfigurable network design. Therefore, in this paper, we first characterize the information dissemination in an IoBT network under vulnerabilities, and use it to design the network parameters to reliably achieve mission specific performance goals with minimal amount of resources. We then present a reconfigurable framework that adapts with the changing connectivity situation of the network.

History
The interest of using IoT technology for defense applications has been growing rapidly over time. In 2017, U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) established the Internet of Battle Things (IoBT) Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA), a research effort that developed foundations of IoBT in the context of future Army operations. The research alliance consisted of private sector and government researchers working jointly to address military challenges in internet-connected, complex battlefields.