Ubiquitous Containerized Cargo Monitoring System Development based on Wireless Sensor Network Technology

Abstract

Due to globalization, global trade is strongly growing nowadays. The use of containers has significantly increased and bringing the change on the shape of the world economy. Thus, monitoring every single container is a big challenge for port industries. Furthermore, rapid development in embedded computing systems has led to the emergence of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology which enabled us to envision the intelligent containers. This represents the next evolutionary development in logistics industry to increase the efficiency, productivity, security of containerized cargo shipping. In this paper, we present a comprehensive containerized cargo monitoring system based on WSNs. We incorporated tilt/motion sensor to improve the network convergence time of container networks. Moreover, we periodically switch the nodes into sleeping mode to save energy and extend the lifetime of the network. Based on the technical implementation on a real container vessel, we strongly believed that our design which employed WSN technology is viable to be implemented in container logistics to improve port services and provide safe transport of containerized cargo.