Integration of heterogeneous objects diverse in technology, environmental constraints and level of trust is a challenging issue. The paper presents a novel trust-based cognitive mechanism making the objects of IoT infrastructure capable to build their situational awareness, and use this knowledge for appropriate reaction to detected threats. We demonstrate, by simulation, the efficiency of the proposed solution, and its robustness to attacks on the reputation system.

The area of military operations is a big challenge for medical support. A particularly important factor that allows medical services to react quickly in the case of mass casualties is the ability to rapidly evacuation of wounded soldiers from a battlefield. To meet this requirement, an effective medical evacuation system is essential. The paper presented the architecture of the electronically supported decision support system for medical evacuation during military operations. The system can also be used by other services such as police or fire service. The system meets the requirements for tactical combat casualty care procedures and is composed of following elements: measurement subsystem, data transmission subsystem and analysis and inference subsystem. The system, based on the continuous monitoring of selected soldiers’ vital signs and biomedical signals, automatically proposes a medical segregation of wounded soldiers (medical triage). The information on the triage was visualized using the Headquarters Management System for medical personnel (first responders, medical officers, medical evacuation groups) and for commanders, if required. All elements of the architecture were described in the paper.

In this paper, the applicability of the network coding technique in 6LoWPAN-based sensor multihop networks is examined. The 6LoWPAN is one of the standards proposed for the Internet of Things architecture. Thus, we can expect the significant growth of traffic in such networks, which can lead to overload and decrease in the sensor network lifetime. The authors propose the inter-session network coding mechanism that can be implemented in resource-limited sensor motes. The solution reduces the overall traffic in the network, and in consequence, the energy consumption is decreased. Used procedures take into account deep header compressions of the native 6LoWPAN packets and the hop-by-hop changes of the header structure. Applied simplifications reduce signaling traffic that is typically occurring in network coding deployments, keeping the solution usefulness for the wireless sensor networks with limited resources. The authors validate the proposed procedures in terms of end-to-end packet delay, packet loss ratio, traffic in the air, total energy consumption, and network lifetime. The solution has been tested in a real wireless sensor network. The results confirm the efficiency of the proposed technique, mostly in delay-tolerant sensor networks.

Medical support in crisis situations is a major challenge. Efficient implementation of the medical evacuation process especially in operations with limited human resources that may occur during armed conflicts can limit the loss of these resources. Proper evacuation of wounded soldiers from the battlefield can increase the chances of their survival and rapid return to further military operations. This paper presents the technical details of the decision support system for medical evacuation to support this process. The basis for the functioning of this system is the continuous measurement of vital signs of soldiers via a specialized measurement module with a set of medical sensors. Vital signs values are then transmitted via the communication module to the analysis and inference module, which automatically determines the color of medical triage and the soldier’s chance of survival. This paper presents the results of tests of our system to validate it, which were carried out using test vectors of soldiers’ vital signs, as well as the results of the system’s performance on a group of volunteers who performed typical activities of tactical operations. The results of this study showed the usefulness of the developed system for supporting military medical services in military operations.

The electromagnetic spectrum’s scarcity, the tactical edge’s dynamic nature, and the variety of tactical operations impose challenges to military cognitive radio networks. Multi-radio dynamic spectrum management (DSM) and routing promise to increase the spectral efficiency and robustness of tactical ad hoc networks by adding key control plane tools that adapt the network to the varying harsh tactical environments. This paper describes a novel concept where implicit spectrum sensing, a distributed DSM architecture with ontology-based spectrum access policies, modified routing and network time synchronization capabilities interplay to address those challenges. The simulation results verify the designed functionality in harsh electromagnetic environments in a multitude of scenario sizes, in terms of number of radio terminals and number of networks. In particular, the simulation of a large operational scenario shows solid scaling capabilities and that ongoing jamming in several networks are efficiently mitigated and low-loss performance are re-established.

The basic technology that will determine the expansion of the technical capabilities of fifth generation cellular systems is a massive multiple-input-multiple-output. Therefore, assessing the influence of the antenna beam orientations on the radio channel capacity is very significant. In this case, the effects of mismatching the antenna beam directions are crucial. In this paper, the methodology for evaluating changes in the received signal power level due to beam misalignment for the transmitting and receiving antenna systems is presented. The quantitative assessment of this issue is presented based on simulation studies carried out for an exemplary propagation scenario. For non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions, it is shown that the optimal selection of the transmitting and receiving beam directions may ensure an increase in the level of the received signal by several decibels in relation to the coaxial position of the beams. The developed methodology makes it possible to analyze changes in the radio channel capacity versus the signal-to-noise ratio and distance between the transmitter and receiver at optimal and coaxial orientations of antenna beams for various propagation scenarios, considering NLOS conditions. In the paper, the influence of the directional antenna use and their direction choices on the channel capacity versus SNR and the distance between the transmitter and receiver is shown.