Internet of Military Things
It is a complex network of interconnected entities, or "things", in the military domain that continually communicate with each other to coordinate, learn, and interact with the physical environment to accomplish a broad range of activities in a more efficient and informed manner.
[3][4] By creating a miniature ecosystem of smart technology capable of distilling sensory information and autonomously governing multiple tasks at once, the IoMT is conceptually designed to offload much of the physical and mental burden that warfighters encounter in a combat setting.
[8] The Internet of Military Things encompasses a large range of devices that possess intelligent physical sensing, learning, and actuation capabilities through virtual or cyber interfaces that are integrated into systems.
Critically, the DoD helped set the stage for future IoT research in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, an early precursor to the Internet that geographically-dispersed military scientists used to share data.
[22] In the 1980s, the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) formally partnered with academic researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carnegie Mellon University to further develop distributed, wireless sensor networks.
These devices served not only to monitor the soldier's physiological status but also to communicate mission data, surveillance intelligence, and other important information to nearby military vehicles, aircraft, and other troops.
While future commercial internet of things may exhibit a lack of uniform standards across different brands and manufacturers, entities in IoBT must remain compatible despite displaying extreme heterogeneity.
In other words, all electronic equipment, technology, or other commercial offerings accessed by military personnel must share the same language or at least have “translators” that make the transfer and processing of different types of information possible.
Unlike commercial network infrastructures, the adoption of IoT in the military domain must take into consideration the extreme likelihood that the environment may be intentionally hostile or unstable, which will require a high degree of intelligence to navigate.
Therefore, individual components can learn, adapt, and interact with each other locally as well as update behaviors and characteristics automatically and dynamically on a global scale to suit the operation as the landscape of warfare constantly evolves.
[35][36] In the context of IoT, the incorporation of artificial intelligence into the sheer volume of data and entities involved in the network will provide an almost infinite number of possibilities for behavior and technological capability in the real world.
[37] For semi-autonomous components, the human cognitive bandwidth serves as a notable constraint for the IoBT due to its limitations in processing and deciphering the flood of information generated by the other entities in the network.
In order to obtain truly useful information in a tactical environment, semi-autonomous IoBT technologies must collect an unprecedented volume of data of immense complexity in levels of abstraction, trustworthiness, value, and other attributes.
[45] Through this approach, DARPA aimed to create an extensive sensor network that can autonomously detect, track, and identify both military, commercial, and civilian vessels as well as indicators of other maritime activity.
[46] The Ocean of Things project focused primarily on the design of the sensor floats and the analytic techniques that would be involved in organizing and interpreting the incoming data as its two main objectives.
Since the crux of the IoMT concept is to have every component of the network—sensors, actuators, software, and other electronic devices—connected together to collect and exchange data, poorly protected IoT devices are vulnerable to attacks which may expose large amounts of confidential information.
[35] Minimizing the risks associated with IoT devices will likely require a large-scale effort by the network to maintain impenetrable cybersecurity defenses as well as employ counterintelligence measures that thwart, subvert, or deter potential threats.
Since adversary forces are expected to adapt and evolve their strategies for infiltrating the IoMT, the network must also undergo a continuous learning process that autonomously improves anomaly detection, pattern monitoring, and other defensive mechanisms.
Since the IoMT system is predicted to produce an immense volume of information, attention was directed toward new approaches to maintaining data properly and regulating protected access that don't allow for leaks or other vulnerabilities.
[31] In addition to the risks of digital interference and manipulation by hackers, concerns have also been expressed regarding the availability of strong wireless signals in remote combat locations.
