The Internet of Things (IoT) is undeniably transforming the way that organizations communicate and organize everyday businesses and industrial procedures. Its adoption has proven well suited for sectors that manage a large number of assets and coordinate complex and distributed processes. This survey analyzes the great potential for applying IoT technologies (i.e., data-driven applications or embedded automation and intelligent adaptive systems) to revolutionize modern warfare and provide benefits similar to those in industry. It identifies scenarios where Defense and Public Safety (PS) could leverage better commercial IoT capabilities to deliver greater survivability to the warfighter or first responders, while reducing costs and increasing operation efficiency and effectiveness. This article reviews the main tactical requirements and the architecture, examining gaps and shortcomings in existing IoT systems across the military field and mission-critical scenarios. The review characterizes the open challenges for a broad deployment and presents a research roadmap for enabling an affordable IoT for defense and PS.

This paper presents a novel home automation system named HASITE (Home Automation System based on Intelligent Transducer Enablers), which has been specifically designed to identify and configure transducers easily and quickly. These features are especially useful in situations where many transducers are deployed, since their setup becomes a cumbersome task that consumes a significant amount of time and human resources. HASITE simplifies the deployment of a home automation system by using wireless networks and both self-configuration and self-registration protocols. Thanks to the application of these three elements, HASITE is able to add new transducers by just powering them up. According to the tests performed in different realistic scenarios, a transducer is ready to be used in less than 13 s. Moreover, all HASITE functionalities can be accessed through an API, which also allows for the integration of third-party systems. As an example, an Android application based on the API is presented. Remote users can use it to interact with transducers by just using a regular smartphone or a tablet.

Low density generator matrix (LDGM) codes are a particular class of low density parity check (LDPC) codes with very low encoding complexity. Single LDGM codes present high error-floors, which can be substantially reduced with the serial concatenation of two LDGM (SCLDGM) codes. We propose a technique to obtain good SCLDGM codes using extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) functions in a novel way. Although the optimization is performed for AWGN channels with binary signaling, the resulting codes are also optimal for AWGN and perfectly-interleaved Rayleigh fading channels with non-binary signaling and perfect CSI at reception, provided that Gray mapping is utilized. Optimized regular and irregular SCLDGM codes outperform heuristically-designed LDGM codes existing in the literature, and have a performance similar to or better than that of irregular repeat accumulate (IRA) codes.

802.11p is one of the most promising future wireless standards due to the increasing demand of vehicular communication applications. At the time of writing, the document of the standard is in draft and much research is still required to study and improve the performance of transceivers in common vehicular scenarios. In this paper, we present a framework to evaluate the PHY layer of IEEE 802.11p systems in realistic situations. We detail the design and implementation of an FPGA-based real-time vehicular channel emulator. Contrarily to commercial emulators, ours is cheap, very flexible, and reconfigurable. We show its capabilities by evaluating performance in different high-speed scenarios. We also study the importance of coding and the benefits of using IEEE 802.11p instead of IEEE 802.11a in vehicular environments. Towards this aim, we developed a reference IEEE 802.11p PHY transceiver software model that can be taken as a convenient starting point for transceiver design.

Recently, analog joint source-channel coding has been proposed as a means of achieving near-optimum performance for high data rates with a very low complexity. However, no experimental evaluation showing the practical feasibility of this scheme has been performed to date. In this paper, we describe a software-defined radio implementation of an analog joint source-channel coded wireless transmission system. Experimental evaluation carried out in an indoor environment making use of a wireless testbed show that the performance perfectly matches that originally reported by simulations in additive white Gaussian noise channels for signal-to-noise ratio values below 20 dB.