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.