Dedicated Networking Solutions for a Container Tracking System

Abstract

Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) researchers in collaboration with Tyndall National Institute, both based in Cork, a city in the southern coast of Ireland, have developed a container management and monitoring system using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), with a support of Cork Port and local industry. The system is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing container management schemes (and with staff procedures) at the port, efficiently, and at low cost, extending its capabilities through remote querying, localization and security. To achieve its goals, the system exploits the capabilities of wireless sensor nodes, used as container ‘tags’, which form a wireless, ad-hoc network throughout the container yard. This chapter will briefly describe the project rationale and the technology development process, which includes hardware solutions built by Tyndall — a dedicated sensor node platform composed from that Institute’s wireless sensor toolkit. It will also discuss the software and networking solutions created and implemented through CIT’s research. This includes specialized graphical user interfaces on portable devices (e.g. a solution was implemented for PDAs, based upon the .NET Compact Framework) and applications for WSN motes, running the TinyOS operating system, to provide full system functionality and multi-hopping communication. The chapter will also describe the work done to overcome the primary project challenges, including the issue of the radio shielding effects of the containers. The final system demonstrates multi-hopping and ad-hoc routing techniques that could exploit the containers, by stack and row, to forward information from one to the next and, in this way, enabling intelligent, reliable communication from anywhere in the port to the management system user.