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Experimentation on C2 and IoT Technical Interoperability� in a Tactical Federated Environment��Paper ID 065�28th ICCRTS: Drivers of Future C2�Topic 6: C2 and Cyber Analytic Ecosystem��PoC: Marco Manso: marco@particle-summary.pt �Presenter: Frank T. Johnsen: Frank-Trethan.Johnsen@ffi.no

Marco Manso, Bárbara Guerra, Fernando Freire @ PARTICLE Summary Ltd. (PARTICLE), PORTUGAL

Niranjan Suri, Roberto Fronteddu, Edoardo Di Caro @ U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) / Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), USA

Reinhard Claus, Daniel Ota @ Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE), GERMANY

Frank T. Johnsen @ Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), NORWAY

Janusz Furtak, Pawel Glebocki @ Military University of Technology (MUT), POLAND

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Outline

  • Background and Motivation
  • Connecting the Battlespace
  • Experiments
  • Conclusion
  • Q&A / Contacts

2

  • This work was performed by the NATO IST-176-RTG “Federated Interoperability of Military C2 and IoT Systems”

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Background and Motivation

  • The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming ubiquitous
    • Exploit the battlefield: support commanders using as many available sources as possible
  • NATO IST-147 “Military application of IoT”
    • Investigated coalition operations in smart cities, integrating IoT into a military information flow (see figure).
  • NATO IST-176 “Federated Interoperability of Military C2 and IoT Systems”
    • Explores aspects of interoperability for ingesting IoT information in military C2 systems

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Technology Stack

Experimentation campaign plan

Hardware

Use COTS: IoT hardware, wearables, sensors, gateways

Communications and Middleware

Use open standards and COTS: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, MQTT

Applications

Demonstration using existing C2 and IoT tools and systems

Security

Provided a theoretical framework to demonstrate in experiments.

This paper

This paper

Through IST-176, we address the challenges related to technical interoperability and investigate an approach to share and exploit IoT data in a federated network of military Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems.

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Background

NATO Interoperability Definition:

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“The ability for Allies to act together coherently, effectively and efficiently to achieve tactical, operational and strategic objectives”

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NATO IST-176 Focus Areas

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Connecting the battlespace

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Connected Soldiers

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IoT Connected Battlespace

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  • Experiments on Message Exchange conducted using Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, previously investigated in NATO IST-150 to support federated networks of military ICT systems.
  • IST-176 expanded on these efforts through development of a common format for MQTT message exchange over TCP/IP
  • Experiments conducted with MQTT (*) featured:
    • A multi-nation scenario where federation is realized at the tactical level, and each nation is responsible for and operates its own MQTT broker, connected via a bridge mechanism.
    • Data from various sources, covering a mix of synthetic and real data from IoT devices and sensors.

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Scope of Work

(*) Setup Caveats: For practical reasons, brokers were connected over the Internet. Only simulated data and data from unclassified sensors were included.

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IST-176 Topic structure: MQTT topics used to filter content & convey meaningful information

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IST-176 Topic structure: functions to topics�

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Experiment setup

  • Multi-national deployment
  • Federation-based
  • Brokers:
    • PARTICLE (Portugal)
    • MUT (Poland)
    • IHMC (USA)
    • FFI (Norway)
    • Fraunhofer FKIE (Germany)

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PARTICLE AWARE

(Portugal)

FKIE SitaWare Frontline

(Germany)

FFI C2 Demonstrator (Norway)

Experiment Setup: Data Visualizers

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Run

Description

Baseline

PRT: Eight soldiers, sending location information every two seconds.

Germany: Three vehicles, sending location information every second, vehicle data (e.g., heading, ammo level, fuel level) every 30 seconds, and a photo (approximately 5KB) every minute.

Norway: Eight soldiers, sending location information every two seconds.

Poland: Warsaw bus transport data: 300 buses with location data transmitted every two minutes.

USA: Twelve weather station towers, each with ten sensors. The towers generated approximately twelve messages per second.

High Frequency

Setup as in the Baseline, except:

USA: Twelve weather station towers each with ten sensors. The twelve towers generated about 500 messages per second.

High Number of Tracks

Setup as in the Baseline, except:

Poland: The number of buses increased from 300 to 4000.

High Frequency and High Number of Tracks

Setup as in the Baseline, except:

High Frequency and High Number of Tracks conditions combined.

Experiment Setup: Runs

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Run

Description

Baseline

PRT: Eight soldiers, sending location information every two seconds.

Germany: Three vehicles, sending location information every second, vehicle data (e.g., heading, ammo level, fuel level) every 30 seconds, and a photo (approximately 5KB) every minute.

Norway: Eight soldiers, sending location information every two seconds.

Poland: Warsaw bus transport data: 300 buses with location data transmitted every two minutes.

USA: Twelve weather station towers, each with ten sensors. The towers generated approximately twelve messages per second.

High Frequency

Setup as in the Baseline, except:

USA: Twelve weather station towers each with ten sensors. The twelve towers generated about 500 messages per second.

High Number of Tracks

Setup as in the Baseline, except:

Poland: The number of buses increased from 300 to 4000.

High Frequency and High Number of Tracks

Setup as in the Baseline, except:

High Frequency and High Number of Tracks conditions combined.

Experiment Execution

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Four experiment runs total:

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GOAL: Establish reference measurements

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GOAL: Frequent updates of sensor measurements

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GOAL: Large number of assets being tracked

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GOAL: Combine features of Runs 2 and 3

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1

2

3

4

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MoM.1: Percentage (%) of messages successfully delivered to all nations

MoP.1: Average delay (in ms) in delivering messages to all nations

MoM.2: Generation of consistent tactical picture across different solutions

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Experiment Setup: Evaluation Metrics

Measures of Merit (MoM) and Performance (MoP)

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Note that analysis was performed using a combination of tools provided by Fraunhofer FKIE (FKIE’s Analysis and Test Environment) & Particle.

Setup / Nation

Germany

Norway

Poland

Portugal

USA

Baseline

4198

2262

1800

2265

7784

High Frequency

3885

2080

1500

2103

317404

High Number of Tracks

4789

2481

8457

2481

8613

High Frequency and High Number of Tracks

3858

2062

5610

2069

292127

Analysis of Results

Messages Generated During Runs

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Note: Aggregated results – see the paper for the full analysis results.

Analysis of Results

(MOM.1) Percentage (%) of messages successfully delivered to all nations

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Note: Aggregated results – see the paper for the full analysis results.

Analysis of Results

(MOP.1) Average delay (in seconds) in delivering messages to all nations

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Note: Aggregated results – see the paper for the full analysis results.

Analysis of Results

(MOP.1) Average delay (in seconds) in delivering messages to all nations

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Note: Aggregated results – see the paper for the full analysis results.

Analysis of Results

(MOM.2) Generation of consistent tactical picture across different solutions

PARTICLE AWARE

(Portugal)

FKIE SitaWare Frontline

(Germany)

FFI C2 Demonstrator (Norway)

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Conclusion

  • We explored the application of IoT and connected forces for exploiting the battlespace and thus gaining information dominance through improved and enhanced shared situational awareness.
    • Multi-national coalition sharing data
  • We presented an approach to connect different kinds of assets that rely on widely used and standardized technologies, thus facilitating information exchange and interoperability.
    • MQTT (transport protocol) + JSON (data formatting)
  • For multi-national deployments, the approach can be effective in supporting collective C2, where each nation has their own tactical infrastructure.
    • Facilitated through MQTT bridge mechanism

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Thank you for your attention!

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Point of contact: Marco Manso marco@particle-summary.pt

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References

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  2. Hirsch, M., A. Becker, F. Angelstorf, and F. Noth. 2019. Performance Analysis of C2IS in Distributed Tactical Networks. 2019 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS). Budva, Montenegro.
  3. IST-150. 2021. NATO Core Services Profiling for Hybrid Tactical Networks. STO TECHNICAL REPORT. Published March 2021. ISBN 978-92-837-2328-8
  4. Johnsen, F. T., et al. 2018. Application of IoT in military operations in a smart city. In: 2018 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS). IEEE, DOI: 10.1109/ICMCIS.2018.8398690.
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  15. Pradhan, M. 2021. Interoperability for Disaster Relief Operations in Smart City Environments. PhD Thesis, The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo, April 2021

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