Container Security Device Chain Network for Safe Railway Transportation

The railway is one of the most important facilities for freight logistics. This paper suggests the use of the container security devices (CSDs), which has been adopted for the marine transportation so far, to enhance the security of railway freight transportation. The proposed protocol, CSD Chain Network Protocol (CCNP), was designed for a chain-form network of CSDs, each of which is attached to a container. In CCNP, unauthorized access to freight is reliably reported to the reader deployed at the locomotive. CCNP also cares about the fairness in energy consumption. In a usual chain network, a tag closer to the reader consumes more energy since it ought to forward packets coming from rear tags as well. However, in CCNP, the tag energy consumption for packet forwarding is always the same regardless of the position in a chain owing to an efficient data fusion scheme. In our simulation using QualNet, CCNP reduces the number of disconnections between tags by 59.5% as compared to general chain networks. The energy consumption also decreases by 91.3% of other networks not using an aggregation method.