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A Review on Internet of Things for Defense and Public Safety
Paula Fraga-Lamas, Tiago M. Fernández-Caramés, Manuel Suárez-Albela, Luis Castedo, Miguel González-López
TL;DR
Defense and public safety need IoT capabilities suited to mission-critical environments, but existing systems face gaps in analytics, management, mobility, security, cloud use, connectivity, and integration. This survey reviews operational scenarios and requirements, proposes relevant architectures and technologies, and characterizes challenges and a research roadmap for deployment.
Problem
Defense and public safety systems have gaps including underused sensor information, manual processing delays, security vulnerabilities, segregated systems, and insufficient battlefield connectivity.
Method
The article surveys defense and public safety IoT scenarios, operational requirements, architectures, technologies, protocols, and research challenges.
Results
The review assesses IoT opportunities and risks across military and public-safety scenarios and proposes architectures, technologies, and protocols addressing major operational capabilities.
Takeaways & Limitations
The paper identifies commercial IoT transformation as a source of opportunities for defense applications across logistics, sensing, healthcare, training, energy management, surveillance, and command systems.
Takeaways & Limitations
Broader military IoT deployment is constrained by segregated vertical stovepipes and insufficient battlefield network connectivity.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
The Internet of Things (IoT) is undeniably transforming the way that organizations communicate and organize everyday businesses and industrial procedures. Its adoption has proven well suited for sectors that manage a large number of assets and coordinate complex and distributed processes. This survey analyzes the great potential for applying IoT technologies (i.e., data-driven applications or embedded automation and intelligent adaptive systems) to revolutionize modern warfare and provide benefits similar to those in industry. It identifies scenarios where Defense and Public Safety (PS) could leverage better commercial IoT capabilities to deliver greater survivability to the warfighter or first responders, while reducing costs and increasing operation efficiency and effectiveness. This article reviews the main tactical requirements and the architecture, examining gaps and shortcomings in existing IoT systems across the military field and mission-critical scenarios. The review characterizes the open challenges for a broad deployment and presents a research roadmap for enabling an affordable IoT for defense and PS.
1. Introduction
IoT connects heterogeneous objects to share information and coordinate decisions, with commercial deployments improving operational efficiency across distributed sectors. The review examines how these capabilities and commercial technologies could apply to defense and public safety, especially mission-critical military scenarios.
- IoT is a distributed system that creates value from data by connecting heterogeneous physical objects to share information and coordinate decisions.
- Commercial IoT has improved monitoring, coordination, efficiency, productivity, decision-making, and effectiveness across manufacturing, supply chains, transportation, healthcare, infrastructure, and automation.
- IoT combines networking, embedded hardware, wireless connectivity, sensing, computation, information management, software architectures, and data analytics.
- IoT technologies could increase tactical efficiency, effectiveness, and safety while reducing long-term costs as adversaries operate in complex suburban scenarios and budgets shrink.
- Military and first responders require timely information exchange, secure communications, resource and supply-chain management, and situational awareness during crisis response.
- The review focuses on military scenarios as the most challenging cases within public safety organizations and proposes a holistic assessment of requirements, challenges, architectures, and emerging-technology relationships.
2. Compelling COTS IoT Applications
Commercial IoT deployments provide defense-relevant examples in transportation, energy, inventory management, and other domains. The paper compares private-sector and defense technology stacks and identifies opportunities to adapt commercial capabilities to tactical systems.
- Network-Centric Warfare connects battlefield assets to headquarters and creates advantages through shared data and secure, timely information exchange.
- Defense and homeland security use advanced sensors, surveillance and reconnaissance drones, satellite communications, and control systems, but lag in routine commercial capabilities such as smartphones and RFID.
- Defense can pursue IoT benefits by partnering with the private sector and adopting IoT-enabled business practices tailored to tactical-system requirements.
- Commercial IoT examples relevant to defense include transportation, energy efficiency, inventory management, and mining.
- European research projects address shortcomings in commercial IoT, including interoperability and enabling technologies for advanced networks.
3. Target Scenarios for Mission-Critical IoT
Mission-critical IoT scenarios span established C4ISR and fire-control applications, logistics, personal sensing, training, and collaborative sensing. These applications support situational awareness, automated responses, fleet and supply management, soldier monitoring, training feedback, and adaptive ISR, while denied environments introduce security risks.
- Defense and public-safety IoT has focused mainly on C4ISR and fire-control, with logistics and training deployments remaining limited and poorly integrated.
- C4ISR and fire-control: C4ISR integrates sensor data from satellites, aircraft, UAVs, ground stations, and soldiers to provide situational awareness and a Common Operational Picture.
- C4ISR and fire-control: Fire-control networks combine sensors and analytics to automate responses to real-time threats and deliver precision firepower.
- Logistics: Logistics IoT supports fleet monitoring, condition-based maintenance, shipment visibility, and on-demand supply management through onboard sensors, RFID, and standardized barcodes.
- Denied environments: Reusing IoT infrastructure in denied areas can support environmental and behavioral monitoring but introduces risks including sabotage, deception, malware, insider threats, and encryption weaknesses.
- Personal sensing and training: Personal sensing and training applications use body-worn, motion, acoustic, and camera data to monitor personnel, support C4ISR, coach exercises, and generate post-exercise statistics.
- Collaborative sensing: Collaborative IoT pairs sensors with mission assignments and combines distributed data into operational pictures, increasing situational awareness while reducing equipment burdens and communication requirements.
4. Operational Requirements
Defense and public-safety IoT requires capabilities that address constrained power, unreliable connectivity, data-management gaps, security, robustness, interoperability, and mobility. The review surveys architectures and technologies intended to improve coordination, sensing, automation, and operational flexibility in mission-critical environments.
- Military IoT adoption must address security, safety, robustness, interoperability, and bureaucratic and cultural barriers.
- Mission devices need power-efficient designs and sufficient energy to last at least for the duration of an operation.Devices may rely on batteries or solar power and may be charged on the move.
- Manual data collection, transformation, evaluation, and sharing can delay mission-critical information and contribute to stalled or failed missions.
- Frequent disconnections, network partitioning, and fluctuating radio conditions constrain sensing availability and transducer usage in military networks.High-bandwidth radios capable of integrated networks were still under development in the reviewed context.
- Opportunistic sensing can discover and select sensor platforms, obtain missing information, and fuse data according to operational scenarios.The review identifies autonomous-sensing protocols as necessary for effective utilization and robust performance.
- Caching and tunneling for resource mobility reduced service loss by 30% in evaluated mobility scenarios.
5. Building IoT for Tactical and Emergency Environments
The paper frames tactical and emergency IoT as an architectural problem without a single converged reference model. It reviews layered architectures, sensing-to-service processing, and the progression toward ubiquitous services.
- IoT architectures have not converged on a common reference model, with three-layer, middleware-based, SOA-based, and six-layer alternatives represented.
- The three-layer model comprises application, network, and perception layers but does not cover all technologies transferring data to an IoT platform.
- SOA-based service composition can consume substantial device time and energy, whereas the simpler three-layer model targets resource-constrained devices.
- Sensing collects network-object data and sends it to a warehouse, database, or cloud system for analysis and action.
- IoT services span identity-related, information aggregation, collaborative-aware, and ubiquitous categories.
- Most existing applications provide the first three service types, while ubiquitous services remain the ultimate goal.
5.1. IoT Standardized Protocols
The review surveys defense-relevant standards and protocols for IoT services, while noting that existing protocol evaluations remain incomplete across the full application-protocol set.
- Military Standards support defense standardization objectives and are also used by other government, technical, and industry organizations.
- The review provides an overview of standardized protocols that could deliver the previously described IoT services.
- CoAP, MQTT, XMPP, AMQP, and DDS are identified as popular application-layer protocols with scenario-dependent performance.
- No evaluation covered all listed application-layer protocols together.
5.2. Enabling Technologies
IoT enabling technologies include diverse wired and wireless communication technologies, but existing protocols provide only limited support for hostile tactical environments.
- The reviewed communication technologies include CAN bus, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4-based systems, and other wired and wireless options.
- IEEE 802.11ah achieved better throughput than IEEE 802.15.4 in idle and non-idle channels, while IEEE 802.15.4 used less energy.
- Existing communication protocols provide rudimentary congestion control, error recovery, and ad-hoc capability.
- None of the reviewed communication protocols was designed for an actively hostile environment.
- RFID, NFC, and UWB are identified as additional technologies used in IoT systems.
5.3. Enabling Protocols
Enabling protocols address IoT routing, identification, and interoperability requirements. RPL supports robust IPv6-based routing, while EPC and CDMA offer different trade-offs for tag identification.
- RPL is an IPv6-based routing protocol designed for minimal routing requirements over robust point-to-point and point-to-multipoint topologies.
- Ubiquitous ID and EPC Global are the two stated standards for unique IoT addresses.
- CDMA lowers expected tag-identification queries by reducing collisions, whereas EPC Gen-2 performs better for transmitted bits and total identification time.
- uCode and EPC provide object identities within a network but are not globally unique; IPv4 and IPv6 support unique object addressing.
5.4. Computation
IoT computation spans constrained and resource-rich hardware, cloud services, and fog architectures. Tactical environments require alternatives to centralized cloud processing because connectivity, resource, and latency constraints limit its viability.
- 5.4.1. Hardware and Software Platforms: IoT hardware platforms divide into powerful, high-consumption single-board computers and battery-efficient motes with lower processing capability.Commercial motes also commonly lack secure communication and encryption support, although newer devices add cryptographic acceleration.
- 5.4. Computation: IoT deployments must store, process, and retrieve large data volumes while detecting patterns or anomalies beyond regular hardware and software capacity.
- 5.4.2. Cloud Platforms: TSaaaS performs time-series pattern searches 10-100 times faster than existing techniques with approximately 0.4% additional storage cost.
- 5.4.2. Cloud Platforms: Centralized cloud architectures are non-viable in tactical environments because connectivity is uneven, processing is expensive, and results incur significant delay.
- 5.4.3. Fog Computing: Fog computing places distributed resources near users to reduce delay, improve real-time performance, scale capacity, and aggregate data before cloud transmission.
- 5.4.3. Fog Computing: Fog computing still requires research on the reliability, mobility, and security of analytical data processed on edge devices.
- 5.4.3. Fog Computing: Resource-constrained devices that cannot support TCP/IP face interoperability issues limiting potential IoT applications.
5.5. Digital Analytics
Digital analytics must manage excessive data volumes and support real-time analysis or human-accessible interfaces. Semantic Web technologies contribute integration, reasoning, and content discovery capabilities for tactical IoT.
- 5.5. Digital Analytics: Analytical software manages excessive data transfer, storage, and analysis, while some applications support automated real-time responses.
- 5.5. Digital Analytics: Semantic Web technologies support IoT data integration, reasoning, and content discovery.
- 5.5. Digital Analytics: Open integration standards and ontology-based reasoning are identified as desirable tactical capabilities, including sensor pairing with mission tasks.
6. Main Challenges and Technical Limitations
Military IoT deployment remains limited by security, connectivity, analytics, interoperability, and device constraints. The roadmap therefore emphasizes secure systems, adaptable networking, intelligent processing, interoperability standards, and energy-efficient hardware.
- 6. Main Challenges and Technical Limitations: Only a small number of military systems leverage IoT’s full advantages, motivating NATO research into critical deployment issues.
- 6. Main Challenges and Technical Limitations: Current battlefield network connectivity is insufficient for broader IoT deployment and requires investment in technical enablers.
- Intelligent systems and infrastructure: Future capabilities include self-configuring networks, distributed intelligence, context-aware processing, semantic discovery, and energy harvesting.
- Security and privacy: The roadmap includes secure authentication, privacy-aware processing, adaptive security, attack resilience, and cybersecurity mechanisms.
- Interoperability and standards: Interoperability priorities include automated adaptation, open validation platforms, heterogeneous-network standards, and data-sharing standards.
- 6. Main Challenges and Technical Limitations: Security is the most significant demand for military IoT adoption, while data analytics and processing capacity are additional limiting factors.
From COTS to Mission-Critical IoT: Further Recommendations
The recommendations emphasize rapid field testing, selective use of commercial technologies, scalable service and security models, and trust frameworks tailored to military requirements.
- Rapid field testing: Rapid field testing should involve military personnel in live training environments to obtain early end-user feedback on emerging technologies.The proposed testbed would identify promising devices and systems before broader development or deployment.
- Commercial technology integration: The military can use civilian 4G/5G LTE waveforms only alongside military-specific architectures, including multiband radios, MANET topologies, and defensive countermeasures.Commercial advances must be paired with communications designs addressing scarce bandwidth and tactical conditions.
- Platform as a Service: Platform as a Service can provide flexible, scalable web-based services without requiring the military to build and maintain supporting infrastructure.The recommendation also notes that private contractors would need to implement additional security procedures.
- Trust management: A comprehensive trust framework is needed to support military IoT requirements, particularly where existing approaches depend on inter-domain policies and control.The recommendation identifies trust management as a central requirement for military deployment.
- Adoption constraints: Defense faces budget constraints, limited incentives for private-sector collaboration, and intellectual-property or export restrictions when pursuing IoT innovation.These constraints complicate investment in systems whose savings may occur only in the future.
7. Conclusions
The article surveys how commercial IoT opportunities can apply to defense and public safety, assesses their value and risks across mission scenarios, and proposes supporting architectures and protocols. It concludes that deployment will be gradual because tactical environments add complexity, resource constraints, and security requirements, while identifying commercial practices and targeted research as practical paths forward.
- Scope and approach: The study examines IoT applications across C4ISR, fire control, logistics, smart cities, sensing, healthcare, training, crowd sensing, energy management, and surveillance.It assesses added value and risks in these scenarios and proposes architectures, technologies, and protocols based on operational requirements.
- Distinctive requirements: Defense and public-safety IoT differs from commercial IoT through more complex deployments, tighter power and communication constraints, and less reliance on centralized cloud architectures.These differences supplement commercial challenges involving standardization, scalability, interoperability, and security.
- Future research: Supply-chain management and logistics are expected to migrate into mission-critical environments, while complex battlefields require further research for their specific demands.Human-cognitive battlefield domains may also require information theories that scale to deterministic situations.
- Conclusion: Broader deployment will take time, although existing commercial technologies and business practices can already provide defense and public-safety savings and advantages.The conclusion rejects a one-size-fits-all solution for defense IoT.
- Recommendations: The authors recommend private-sector development and acquisition practices, bottom-up innovation, military testbeds, and scalable security for commercial and cloud-hosted systems.These measures are presented as ways to improve leverage from IoT investments while addressing tactical security needs.
Abbreviations
The abbreviations list defines recurring defense, public-safety, networking, communications, and IoT service concepts used throughout the manuscript.
- Defense and public safety: The abbreviation list includes defense and command concepts such as DoD, C2, C4ISR, COP, ISR, NCW, and PPDR.It also includes Blue Force Tracking, armored combat vehicles, anti-jamming, and electronic protection measures.
- IoT services and architectures: IoT service and architecture abbreviations include IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, SOA, QoI, VoI, RFID, and EPC.The list spans cloud services, service architectures, information value, and identification technologies.
- Networking and communications: Networking and communications abbreviations include MANET, NFC, NFV, SDR, TLS, Wi-Fi, and WSN.These terms cover mobile networking, wireless access, security, software-defined radio, and sensor networks.