Securing freight trains for hazardous material transportation: a WSN-based monitoring system

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 train 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 mechanisms. 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 most significant results about measurement parameters and networks performance.