Today’s battlefield is highly technical and dynamic. We are not only fighting people and weapons but also defending and attacking information at light speed. For mission success, the American warrior in the field and commanders up the chain need the support of highly adaptive systems that can quickly and securely establish reliable communications and deliver real-time intelligence anytime and anywhere.
“The internet of battlefield things will depend on modernized networks,” says C4ISRNet in an issue of Defense Network of Tomorrow. Military planners envision a future battlefield defined by the internet of things, one in which smart devices, soldier-worn sensors and unmanned aircraft produce a nonstop torrent of actionable data. In this near-future war space, “current, commonly available, interconnected ‘things’ will exist in the battlefield and be increasingly intelligent, obfuscated, and pervasive,” according to Army documents. The promised wellspring of new ISR data “requires connectivity and security,” said Mike Leff, vice president for global defense at AT&T Public Sector. “You need a robust network to give you that competitive advantage on the battlefield.” Military leaders back this assessment. Eager as they are to cull ISR data from an IoT-rich environment, they say they need a modernized network infrastructure to support that capability.
The internet of things, that loose assortment of tiny sensors now embedded in seemingly everything, can collectively do a lot. Each individual sensor isn’t capable of very much but when combined with billions of others, they can map human behavior, help to predict everything from shopping trends to the weather, and perform millions of other tasks, both mundane and critical. They are even making their way into heavily industrialized applications, and have also been hijacked and used for bad things, like the world’s largest botnet attack. But despite their seeming hegemony and limitless potential, there are a couple places where the tiny sensors have yet to gain much of a foothold. One of them is deep in the world’s oceans, and the other is on the frontlines of today’s modern battlefield. The armed forces want to change that, with the Navy working to develop its own flotilla of seafaring IoT vessels and the Army bringing the technology to battlefields.
“Internet of Intelligent Battle Things (IOBT) is the emerging reality of warfare,” as AI and machine learning advances, says Alexander Kott, chief of the Network Science Division of the US Army Research Laboratory. He envisions a future where physical robots are able to fly, crawl, walk, or ride into battle. The robots as small as insects can be used as sensors, and the ones as big as large vehicles can carry troops and supplies. There will also be “cyber robots,” basically autonomous programmes, used within computers and networks to protect communications, fact-check, relay information, and protect other electronic devices from enemy malware.
Even as developers are struggling with how to integrate the various pieces of the emerging internet of things, the federal government is investing millions for a five-year brainstorming project to explore how to develop and secure connected devices on the battlefield .
The Army Research Lab recently awarded $25 million to the Alliance for Internet of Battlefield Things Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (IoBT REIGN) to develop new predictive battlefield analytics.
US-based company SRI International has announced that it is leading security research for the US Army Research Lab initiative to develop and secure the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT).
Known as the ‘Alliance for IoBT Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (IoBT REIGN)’, the initiative received a funding of $25m from the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in October last year.
The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has awarded a $25 million contract to a group that includes SRI International and several universities. They will work to develop and secure the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), as part of the IoBT Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (IoBT REIGN) program. As military operations rely less on human soldiers and more on interconnected technology, the goal of the IoBT program is to understand and exploit the capabilities of networked battlefield systems and create a cyber network of things that adapts as the mission evolves. Led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the team includes SRI International and collaborators from ARL, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Massachusetts, and University of Southern California. SRI is leading security research for the initiative. The funding covers the first five years of a potential 10-year effort.
The Army’s work on the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is more than just a way to carve out a catchy name for the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, wearable devices, cameras and embedded devices that take the field with military forces. It also underscores the most important element of having those connected devices–the data collection and automated analytics capabilities required to make good use of the information they provide.
The explosion of things connected to the Internet in everyday life and the industrial sectors has naturally led to subsets within the IoT. There are internets of Aircraft Things, Space Things, Underwater Things, and Medical Things. But like projects in other areas, the Army Research Laboratory’s $25 million IoBT project, is focused mostly on back-end processing. Being led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the project is a collaborative research alliance (CRA) looking to go beyond machines following orders to where they work almost as partners with soldiers in the field.
Over the next 30 years, the U.S. military will find itself fighting more battles in urban areas as populations rise across the globe. Cities such as Shanghai and Beijing currently contain more than 20 million residents each, and the United Nations expects the number of “megacities” — with populations surpassing 10 million people — to increase from 28 in 2016 to nearly 50 by 2030.
Residents in those areas will use smartphones, tablets and wearable devices, and be connected to the internet. As data sources become more widespread, the proliferation of “internet of things”-enabled devices — electronic tools that use the web to interact with each other and with the physical world — offer increased benefits for situational awareness, signals intelligence and communication, military and industry leaders have said.
