The Use of Wireless Sensor Networks for Homeland Security

One of the aspects of homeland security is to secure public areas and buildings against intrusion. The use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an efficient and reliable solution for doing perimeter surveillance, which allows detecting intrusions and the timely location of dangerous devices. The deployment of WSNs for these purposes has to satisfy performance and functional requirements that are identified in the paper. The satisfaction of these requirements leads to the proposal of a suitable WSN architecture to deal with the perimeter surveillance application. One of the components of the architecture is the data transport protocol for which an innovative solution was developed. A prototype demonstrator has been deployed at the research laboratory of the authors.