A Military Mobile Network Design: mHealth, IoT and Low Power Wide Area Networks

Networks for military applications have unique characteristics as they have high security requirements and adaptability to changing circumstances and landscape. As a result, they are usually composed of unstructured networks. Ad hoc networks are unstructured in nature and are increasing in prevalence with such examples being Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). These are emerging alongside various applications such as health monitoring and emergency user location identification, which can be further augmented with alarm detection that raises alarms from the inference of a user’s situation via the use of sensors and personal devices within an LPWAN. During a military operation, injured personnel or those at emergent health risks could be identified and located from an automatic alarm activation in such an application. This paper discusses the design and aspects of a network for secure automated messaging and data fusion which could be applicable to a military setting.