Concepts and Directions for Future IoT and C2 Interoperability

The evolving fields of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have allowed a multitude of state and non-state actors to leverage remote, ubiquitous and context rich computing for solving future challenges. Individually, standards underlying ICT/IoT serve the purpose they were devised for in supporting predetermined use cases and application domains, but often present significant challenges when underlying technologies must be re-purposed or integrated in new ways. Corresponding technology integration challenges are often addressed through ad-hoc solutions (e.g., stove-piped interfaces, data federation and exchange services) which make it very difficult to scale and adapt to the needs of cross-coalition Command Control (C2) infrastructures. Following from NATO IST-176 efforts, this paper reviews key design requirements for developing NATO C2 Data Models to facilitate COTS IoT and NATO STANAG interoperability. Here, the idea is not to propose an entirely new standard but to identify and catalogue methods to reuse existing standards to improve interoperability as well as introduce extensibility to enable next-generation coalition operations.