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Security and accountability within the transportation industry are vital because cargo theft could amount to as much as $60 billion per year. Since goods are often handled by many different parties, it must be possible to tightly monitor the location of cargo and handovers. Tracking trade is difficult to manage in different formats and legacy applications Web services and open standards overcome these problems with uniform interfaces and common data formats. This allows consistent reporting, monitoring and analysis at each step. The purpose of this paper is to examine Transportation Security SensorNet (TSSN), the goal being to promote the use of open standards and specifications in combination with web services to provide cargo monitoring capabilities.

This paper describes a system architecture for the TSSN targeted for cargo monitoring. The paper discusses cargo security and reviews related literature and approaches. The paper then describes the proposed solution of developing a service‐oriented architecture (SOA) for cargo monitoring and its individual components.

Web services in a mobile sensor network environment have been seen as slow and producing significant overhead. The authors demonstrate that with proper architecture and design the performance requirements of the targeted scenario can be satisfied with web services; the TSSN then allows sensor networks to be utilized in a standardized and open way through web services.

The integration of SOA, open geospatial consortium (OGC) specifications and sensor networks is complex and difficult. As described in related works, most systems and research focus either on the combination of SOA and OGC specifications or on OGC standards and sensor networks. The TSSN shows that all three can be combined and that this combination provides cargo security and monitoring capabilities to the transportation and other industries that have not existed before.