IoT in Coalition Federated Operations: Multi-National C2 Integration and Technical Interoperability Experiments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging and disruptive technology in the military domain. Military technology innovators can exploit the IoT world to promote information superiority in the battlespace through novel and abundant sensory capabilities. Our research was conducted as part of the NATO research task group IST-176 on "Federated Interoperability of Military C2 and IoT Systems" to investigate how IoT data can be ingested into C2 systems in a federated coalition operation. Our approach leverages industrial standard protocols and formats, while including optional fields to convey military-specific unit information along with IoT sensor data. Our experiments demonstrate and validate the approach in which systems from different nations are connected in a federated environment, delivering a high success rate in message delivery and enabling a consistent display of the situational picture across different C2 systems. The results of the experiments demonstrate the feasibility of integrating IoT information in a military information flow, to support collective C2.