Container Security Device Chain Network for Safe Railway Transportation

Abstract

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.

Optimal Link Deployment for Minimizing Average Path Length in Chain Networks

“…Chain-topology networks performs poorly in certain performance metrics such as throughput, robustness, energy efficiency in data transmissions [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. This is mostly due to fact that average path length (AP L) in chain-topology is extremely high, which is almost one third of network size as we showed.…”

“…Given the side effects of unbalanced energy consumptions at nodes in chain networks used in underground mines or on trains, the studies of [1,3,4,6] proposed different protocols or node deployment strategies, aiming to provide balanced energy consumptions at nodes in order to increase network lifetime.…”

“…Many industries, today, prefer chain topology on their networks comprised of nodes connected each other consecutively throughout both long and narrow deployment areas like railways [1], highways [2], underground mines [3,4], as well as in some special type of wireless sensor and mesh networks [3][4][5][6][7] and backbones of telecommunication systems [8]. Similarly, it is also a well-known implementation to connect (wi-fi) routers in daisy-chain topology to provide internet access at each floor in towers or high buildings.…”

Evolution of spatial and temporal patterns of railway container transportation: A case study of China cities

“…Researchers have promoted the development of sea–rail combined transport ( 10 ) by examining the relationship between railway containers and terminals ( 11 ) to accelerate the shift from road to rail. Some studies have focused on upgrading and optimizing RCT equipment, including the container safety equipment chain ( 12 ), gantry crane dispatcher ( 13 ), and tank containers ( 14 ) to improve transport efficiency. The low environmental cost of RCT is primarily reflected in its energy consumption and CO 2 emissions.…”