Title: SeNsiM-SEC: secure sensor networks integration to monitor rail freight transport

Authors: Valentina Casola; Alessandra De Benedictis; Annarita Drago; Nicola Mazzocca

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, via Claudio 21, Napoli, Italy ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, via Claudio 21, Napoli, Italy ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, via Claudio 21, Napoli, Italy ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, via Claudio 21, Napoli, Italy

Abstract: In recent years, the interest in monitoring infrastructures has spread in many application domains, even because of the number of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. This important activity can be seen in the general context of critical infrastructure protection, such as the freight trains meant for hazardous materials transportation. The design of these systems must answer to several issues: low-cost, easiness of installation, interoperability of information sources, security requirements. The use of wireless sensor networks emerged in this field as a compliant solution to these issues. In this paper, we will present a monitoring system that uses heterogeneous WSN to monitor a freight train transporting hazardous materials. The sensors interact through a security platform in order to share different information. We illustrate some details on the architecture and the software application to prove the feasibility of such system on a real scenario, by discussing the most significant results about measurement parameters and networks performance.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; network integration; network security; critical infrastructures; rail protection; data integrity; rail freight transport; infrastructure monitoring; freight monitoring; infrastructure protection; freight trains; hazardous materials; railways.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSE.2013.057653

International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, 2013 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.291 - 316

Received: 23 May 2013
Accepted: 29 Jun 2013
Published online: 28 Apr 2014 *

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