A wireless sensor network in port security

Millions of cargo containers are transported around the world and over 25,000 cargo containers arrive at US ports every day. Each container has to be identified and monitored for security and also for the integrity of the cargo, called condition sensing. This research looks at the current methods used for monitoring and identification. A wireless sensor based monitoring system over the IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee protocol is proposed for the condition sensing. The design of an efficient low-cost wireless ZigBee to Wi-Fi Bridge Interface incorporating a 128-bit AES data encryption security module in hardware is described. The proposed design provides a low-cost robust self-contained bridge solution that allows inter-network communication between the sensor network and the IEEE 802.11b wireless network. Xilinx Spartan 3A FPGA evaluation board is chosen as a platform for the bridge interface design, and implemented using Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) for overall embedded system design and development, ISE for FPGA hardware development, and Mentor Graphics ModelSim for design verification.