An open system transportation security sensor network: field trial experiences

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. However, field testing is required to validate the system architecture as well as to determine if the system can provide timely event notification. Field experiments were conducted to assess the TSSN's suitability for monitoring rail-borne cargo. Log files were collected from these experiments and postprocessed. We present the TSSN architecture and results of field experiments, including the time taken to report events using the TSSN as well as on the interaction between various components of the TSSN. These results show that the TSSN architecture can be used to monitor rail-borne cargo. i

A Taxonomy of Sensor Network Architectures

Several architectures have been proposed for sensor networks. However, there is a lack of an over-arching sensor network architecture. Here we present some of the issues associated with existing sensor network architectures. Next we present several sensor network architectures, including one suitable for a multi-owner environment, classifying these architectures in terms of function and compositional elements. We also highlight each architecture’s key attributes in order to identify their commonalities. In making our arguments we refer to the concept of invariants, which are components of a system that cannot be changed without losing backward compatibility [1]. Our results show that while several sensor network architectures exist, each with different attributes, these architectures share several invariants. Key words