Toward an architecture and data model to enable interoperability between federated mission networks and IoT-enabled smart city environments

The emergence of smart city initiatives in many areas of the world has led to rapid development and proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Successful deployments of IoT have resulted in the military looking at the impacts and benefits of IoT, both for directly leveraging IoT within the military environment as well as to interface with smart city environments for urban operations such as humanitarian assistance and disaster response. This article describes some of the outcomes of the NATO IST-147 Research Task Group that was established to explore the military applications of IoT. Within the NATO context, the concept of federated mission networks (FMNs) enables coalition partners to plan, prepare, establish, use, and terminate mission networks in support of federated operations. In this article, we propose an architecture and data model to enable interoperability between FMN and IoT networks in smart city environments. We review the various bottlenecks involved for such an environment and how a reference implementation can be set up to allow multiple partners to exchange data for sharing resources and provide better situational awareness. The concepts discussed reuse and improvise upon the existing NATO and commercial IoT standards for faster adoption. Finally, open research challenges are discussed as future research directions.