Experimentation on C2 and IoT Technical Interoperability in a Tactical Federated Environment

Modern military forces are highly interconnected and deal with a wide range of devices and data originated from internal and external systems. In this regard, IoT has gained the attention of military technology innovators as a means to gain information dominance in the battlespace, through enhanced and augmented situational awareness. Produced as part of the NATO research task group IST-176 on "Federated Interoperability of Military C2 and IoT Systems", this paper describes performed experiments whose aim was to explore novel approaches for a federated tactical deployment in a coalition environment, involving different C2 systems and IoT infrastructures with heterogeneous capabilities and ownership. The conducted experiments had several runs with different manipulations, including high datarates and high number of tracks, demonstrating unprecedent scalability and flexibility, as well as the capability to generate a high success rate in message delivery (above 99%), small message delivery delays (median values between 127 ms and 154 ms, with minimum median of 4ms) and a consistent situational picture across different C2 systems. Importantly, the experiments demonstrated robust technical effectiveness for multi-national operational deployments, supporting collective C2, whilst nations operate their own tactical infrastructure.