Tactical networking environments present many challenges in terms of bandwidth, latency, reliability, stability, and connectivity. Sensors can today generate very large data sets that exceed the ability of tactical networks to transfer and disseminate them in a timely manner. Furthermore, the desire to cover larger areas with persistent sensing capabilities, have resulted in the widescale deployment of inexpensive sensors, further widening the gap between the volume of information that is generated and the subset that can successfully be delivered to consumers. This article explores the notion of determining the value of information in order to prioritize and filter information that is disseminated over these tactical networks, focusing on the dissemination of information to and from dismounted soldiers in a battlefield environment. This is a promising approach to mitigate the constraints of tactical networks and to reduce information overload on soldiers

As the Internet of Things (IoT) matures in commercial sectors, the promise of diverse new technologies such as data-driven applications, intelligent adaptive systems, and embedded optimized automation will be realized in every environment. An immediate research question is whether contemporary IoT concepts can be applied also to military battlefield environments and can realize benefits similar to those in industry. Military environments, especially those that depend on tactical communications, are much more challenging than commercial environments. Thus it is likely many commercial IoT architectures and technologies may not translate into the military domain and others will require additional research to enable deployment and efficient implementation. This paper investigates these issues and describes potential military operational activities that could benefit from commercial IoT technologies, including logistics, sensing/surveillance, and situation awareness. In addition, the paper lays out a roadmap for future research necessary to leverage IoT and apply it to the tactical battlefield environment

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People-centric sensing is a novel approach that exploits the sensing capabilities offered by smartphones and the mobility of users to sense large scale areas without requiring the deployment of sensors in-situ. Given the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, people-centric sensing is a viable and efficient solution for crowdsourcing data. In this work, we propose a fully distributed, opportunistic sensing framework that involves two main components which both work in an ad hoc fashion: Recruitment and Data Collection. We analyzed the feasibility of our distributed approach for both components through preliminary simulations. The results show that our recruitment method is able to select 66% of the nodes that are appropriate for the sensing activity and 88% of the messages sent by these selected nodes reach the sink by using our data collection method.

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