IoT for Defense and National Security

18Military IoT: Tactical Edge Clouds for Content Sharing Across Heterogeneous Networks

Tim Strayer, Sam Nelson, Dan Coffin, Bishal Thapa, Joud Khoury, Armando Caro, Michael Atighetchi and Stephane Blais

Raytheon BBN, Cambridge, MA, USA

Abstract

Just as inexpensive and powerful devices are driving ecosystems of connected Internet of Things in work and home environments, the battlefield has experienced a proliferation of and reliance on networked devices. However, current networking technologies are ill‐suited for content sharing in these emerging military networks where fixed infrastructures and constant connectivity cannot be assumed. The communication paradigm, content‐based networking, is proving to be a highly effective solution for operation in mobile infrastructure‐less environments where intermittent and disrupted connectivity is expected. We present approaches and tradeoffs for content‐centric military IoT architectures that facilitate generation and dissemination of content in challenging tactical edge environments. These architectures are designed to address information flow across different underlying tactical data links by managing the dissemination of mission‐critical information across an overlay network optimized for disconnected, intermittent, and limited (DIL) connectivity operations.

18.1 Introduction

The proliferation of inexpensive and powerful embedded computational and networking capabilities is driving the explosion of things connected to the internet, ...