Towards friendly force tracking with MQTT over LoRa

Abstract

With the steady growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the civilian commercial sector, the question arises as to whether such IoT concepts can also be used for defense purposes. Military needs, especially those that depend on tactical communications, can be regarded as more challenging to solve than the needs that are focused on in the civilian sector. Therefore, one can expect that much of the work done in the civilian sector cannot necessarily be used directly for military purposes and that targeted research and development in this field will be required to enable effective deployment. This paper explores using Raspberry Pi 3 and the Long-range Radio (LoRa) protocol as an IoT platform for friendly force tracking with the light-weight, industry standard Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) publish/subscribe protocol.