  The Internet of things (IoT) is revolutionizing the management and control of
automated systems leading to a paradigm shift in areas such as smart homes,
smart cities, health care, transportation, etc. The IoT technology is also
envisioned to play an important role in improving the effectiveness of military
operations in battlefields. The interconnection of combat equipment and other
battlefield resources for coordinated automated decisions is referred to as the
Internet of battlefield things (IoBT). IoBT networks are significantly
different from traditional IoT networks due to battlefield specific challenges
such as the absence of communication infrastructure, heterogeneity of devices,
and susceptibility to cyber-physical attacks. The combat efficiency and
coordinated decision-making in war scenarios depends highly on real-time data
collection, which in turn relies on the connectivity of the network and
information dissemination in the presence of adversaries. This work aims to
build the theoretical foundations of designing secure and reconfigurable IoBT
networks. Leveraging the theories of stochastic geometry and mathematical
epidemiology, we develop an integrated framework to quantify the information
dissemination among heterogeneous network devices. Consequently, a tractable
optimization problem is formulated that can assist commanders in cost
effectively planning the network and reconfiguring it according to the changing
mission requirements.
