Transportation SecuritySensorNet: a service-orientedarchitecture for cargo monitoringMartin Kuehnhausen and Victor S. FrostDepartment of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USAAbstractPurpose – Security and accountability within the transportation industry are vital because cargotheft could amount to as much as $60 billion per year. Since goods are often handled by many differentparties, it must be possible to tightly monitor the location of cargo and handovers. Tracking trade isdifficult to manage in different formats and legacy applications Web services and open standardsovercome these problems with uniform interfaces and common data formats. This allows consistentreporting, monitoring and analysis at each step. The purpose of this paper is to examineTransportation Security SensorNet (TSSN), the goal being to promote the use of open standards andspecifications in combination with web services to provide cargo monitoring capabilities.Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes a system architecture for the TSSNtargeted for cargo monitoring. The paper discusses cargo security and reviews related literature andapproaches. The paper then describes the proposed solution of developing a service-orientedarchitecture (SOA) for cargo monitoring and its individual components.Findings – Web services in a mobile sensor network environment have been seen as slow andproducing significant overhead. The authors demonstrate that with proper architecture and design theperformance requirements of the targeted scenario can be satisfied with web services; the TSSN thenallows sensor networks to be utilized in a standardized and open way through web services.Originality/value – The integration of SOA, open geospatial consortium (OGC) specifications andsensor networks is complex and difficult. As described in related works, most systems and researchfocus either on the combination of SOA and OGC specifications or on OGC standards and sensornetworks. The TSSN shows that all three can be combined and that this combination providescargo security and monitoring capabilities to the transportation and other industries that have notexisted before.Keywords Telemetry, Freight forwarding, Security, Tracking, System monitoring,Intermittently connected wireless networks, Communication system software, Data communication,Software engineeringPaper type Research paper1. IntroductionThe theft and tampering of cargo are common problems in the transportation industry.According to Wolfe (2004), the “FBI estimates cargo theft in the USA to be $18 billion”and the Department of Transportation, “estimated that the annual cargo loss in theUSA might be $20-$60 billion”. Wolfe (2004) also gives good reason to believe that theactual number may be even higher than $100 billion because of two reasons. First,it is assumed that about 60 percent of all thefts go unreported and second, the indirectcosts associated with a loss are said to be three to five times the direct costs. With theadvances in technology, this problem has evolved into a cat-and-mouse game wherethieves constantly try to outsmart the newest cutting edge security systems.The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available atwww.emeraldinsight.com/1328-7265.htmTSSN for cargomonitoring369Received 24 December 2010Revised 16 March 2011Accepted 14 May 2011Journal of Systems and InformationTechnologyVol. 13 No. 4, 2011pp. 369-388q Emerald Group Publishing Limited1328-7265DOI 10.1108/13287261111183979In terms of securing cargo, there are usually two aspects: first ensuring the physicalsafety of the cargo and second monitoring and tracking it. There has been increasinginterest in the latter because many shipments cross national borders and cargo may behandled by a multitude of carriers. All of this leads to a demand for tracking and monitoringsystems by the cargo owners, carriers, insurance companies, customs, and many others.This paper is part of a series that describe the design, various components andconducted experiments of the Transportation Security SensorNet (TSSN). An extendedversion can be found in a thesis by Kuehnhausen (2009). In this paper, we focus on thesoftware architecture and refer to papers that deal with the other parts of the TSSN;specifically, Fokum et al. (2010) give an overview of the hardware utilized and describesin detail truck trials and a short haul train trial. Kuehnhausen and Frost (2010a) presenta new and flexible approach to deal with challenges such as intermittent andlow-bandwidth communication in mobile monitoring environments and a long haultrain trial in Mexico. Furthermore, Kuehnhausen and Frost (2010b) discuss a frameworkfor analyzing and visualizing simple object access protocol (SOAP) messages toovercome the challenges of complexity and disparity that web service monitoring andmanagement approaches face. Security associated with the TSSN and specificallyissues that arose when integrating elements from the web services architecture (WSA)led by the world wide web consortium, specifically publish/subscribe communicationand service security are described in Komp et al. (2010).Here, an architecture is introduced which builds on open standards and softwarecomponents to allow “monitoring cargo in motion along trusted corridors”. The focuslies on the use of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and geographical informationsystem (GIS) specifications such as from the open geospatial consortium (OGC) in orderto allow an industry wide adoption of this open framework.In the following we discuss the problems of proprietary systems, the advantages ofopen standards and the approach of using a SOA in the transportation industry. Weintroduce the design and architecture and explain the individual components as well asthe software components and specifications that are used in the implementation.The discussion of proprietary systems in contrast to open standards in thefollowing section provides an overview of the challenges that trade and shippingpartners face. It explains why it is important to design an open system that is based onstandards. Some of the main advantages are a decrease in cost, more efficient shipmentmanagement, and enhanced visibility and tracking capabilities. This paper presentsthe architecture of the TSSN that was implemented to show that such an open systemcan be built and deployed successfully.2. Problem areaIn order to address the