Satellite Based IoT for Mission Critical Applications

In the recent years, world has witnessed the ubiquitous applications of Internet of things (IoT) for many different scenarios. There are several critical applications where the results are essential and the mission has to be successful at any cost. Such applications are well known as mission critical applications. These applications are really critical and deal with very serious situations such as disaster management, rescue operations and military applications. IoT can provide both accuracy and sustainability in these applications. IoT in fact, is suitable for several critical applications because it can be deployed at locations where human presence is not possible due to the dangers to human life. In such cases, collection of information can be done through IoT sensors and it can be sent directly to the processing hubs. These days we find several mission critical applications where both increased reliability and coverage have very high priorities. Hybridization of IoT and satellite networks can be a game changer in these applications. In this article, we present the general features of mission critical IoT and the motivation for connecting it with the satellite networks. Then we present the main deployment related issues of these hybrid networks. We focused on the hybridization aspects of narrowband IoT (NBIoT) with the satellite networks. Because NBIoT has the energy efficiency which can make the satellite based IoT networks sustainable in the long term.