Experiences from a Transportation Security Sensor Network Field Trial

Abstract

Cargo shipments are subject to hijack, theft, or tampering. Furthermore, cargo shipments are at risk of being used to transport contraband, potentially resulting in fines to shippers. The Transportation Security Sensor Network (TSSN), which is based on open software systems and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles, has been developed to mitigate these risks. Using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, the TSSN is able to detect events and report those relevant to appropriate decision makers. Prior to deploying the TSSN it should be determined if the system can provide timely event notification. A field experiment was conducted to assess the TSSN's suitability for monitoring rail-borne cargo. Log files were collected from this experiment and postprocessed. In this paper we present empirical results on the time taken to report events using the TSSN. These results show that the TSSN can be used to monitor rail-borne cargo.

An Open-System Transportation Security Sensor Network: Field-Trial Experiences

“…Proper operation means all messages were transmitted, received, and processed as expected and decision makers received all correct notification. 9 Thus, the following items were within scope of our experiments: the stability and timely performance of the communications protocols between TSSN component services, whereas the following items were out of scope: overall system robustness, whole train monitoring, energy consumption of the sensors, comprehensive security 1 issues, such as message spoofing, and decision maker response time given that event notification had been delivered.…”

“…exchanged are found in [27]. All of the MRN Alarms received by the VNOC AlarmProcessor met the necessary rules so that they could be forwarded to decision makers as SMS and/or e-mail messages.…”

“…TSSN event notification is also impacted by unpredictable packet latency on commercial networks and the use of of e-mail and/or Short Message Service (SMS) [8] for event notification. Thus, we have designed and implemented hardware and software needed to realize a prototype of the TSSN and carried out experiments [9] to characterize the system, particularly the end-to-end time between event occurrence and decision maker notification using SMS or e-mail as well as the impact of SOA overhead.…”

Rail Sensor Testbed Program: Active Agents in Containers for Transport Chain Security: Algorithms

“…In the experiments, we tested the above algorithms on the sensor data collected for a short haul rail trial [7]. We used seven Sun Small Programmable Object Technology devices (or SPOTs) to collect data; six were in the box together and experimented on, and the seventh was held separately as a control to gain an idea of baseline noise.…”

Automatic Multi-sensor Task Allocation Using Modified Distributed Bees Algorithm

“…But, RFIDs have known limitations such as limited communication bandwidth, reliability issues, tag memory, range coverage and heterogeneous reader landscape [5]. Using distributed sensors and sensor networks can improve monitoring performance and cope with unpredictable security events [6].…”