Agile IoT for Critical Infrastructure Resilience: Cross-Modal Sensing As Part of a Situational Awareness Approach

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) continues proliferation. Hospitals, energy industry, power grid, food and water, transportation, etc., are critical asset resources. Critical systems must remain steadfast and reliable. This IoT evolution, sometimes termed, industrial IoT, is significant for critical infrastructure. In harsh climates, human lives can depend daily on these systems functioning well. Better situational awareness can improve resilience of these critical infrastructures and make them increasingly robust. In this paper, the method of agile IoT for critical infrastructure resilience is presented, and an agile IoT model is presented to use signal processing middleware to enable existing sensors commonly deployed in critical infrastructure to be agilely repurposed to: 1) add parallel communication methods and/or 2) sense additional mechanical/physical parameters using existing hardware. The results of the proposed method are applied to use common temperature sensors to detect nontemperature parameters: fluid flow in a pipe (manufacturing or water), ice buildup (transportation or energy infrastructure), and of mechanical door state (health venues of life-saving medicine stored in hospital refrigerators).