Homeland Security Insider
Going with the Flow

By Col. Timothy D. Ringgold – April 2007

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Improving port and waterway transportation security are essential strategies for continuing homeland security. Providing port and waterway security entails regulating the flow of traffic from ports and harbors and across the nation’s waterways so dangerous and unwanted goods and people are detected and denied entry. This requires a sophisticated information management system that balances the need for securing the waterways with facilitating an essential free flow of legitimate commerce, citizens and authorized visitors.
Every waterway information system, no matter how simple or advanced, consist of several key parts. These key components include sensors, data storage and analysis, and visualization of the system.

fig 1 Waterway Information System

This figure shows a typical waterway information system that receives information from several types of sensors, stores and analyses that information, and then provides the users a view of the waterway operations through dynamic Web pages and more advanced command and control displays.

Sensoring the Waterway Environment
Remote sensors provide the “eyes” of any waterway information system. A small river port might consist of a few surveillance cameras, and on a large, deep-water port, sensors might include radar, sonar, infrared cameras and environmental sensors. Wireless technology allows us to remotely place sensors to monitor vessel transit, marine mammal habitat and other coastal areas of environmental, commercial, recreational and, of course, security interests. The broadband nature of high-bandwidth networks on the water allows incorporation of bandwidth-hogging video/voice applications, along with arrays of environmental sensors, which are essentially low-data rate.
Combining sensor and telemetry modules with inexpensive housing yields wireless sensor system nodes capable of being scaled into networks. Depending on the sensitivity of the waterway being monitored, the sensor network might include acoustic doppler current profilers; turbidity; underwater cameras for bottom topography/habitat monitoring; hydrophone bio classification monitors; acoustic imagers for biomass monitoring; water quality sensor stack; or nutrient sensors.

Data Storage, Backup and Recovery
Sophisticated sensors are useless unless the data can be stored, analyzed and protected. During Hurricane Katrina, not only did the Mississippi Gulf Coast take significant physical damage, but data records were also lost for some ports. A regional data storage and recovery center is needed to protect against this type of catastrophe.
Unfortunately, providing a secure backup and recovery capability to a port is not a trivial matter. Ports are complicated organizations that can have numerous independent entities operating from within its boundaries—each entity having its own computer hardware and software and unique backup requirements. To be effective, regional data center must have the capability to centrally manage all heterogeneous storage resources as a single pool, creating a virtual data pool. From a pool, the regional data center presents one or more virtualized disks to application servers or hosts, potentially composed of storage from different vendors. A storage pool simplifies the provisioning of storage to applications and hosts and allows under-utilized capacity to be freed. While the regional center might consist of only one vendor’s storage devices, client date might be stored on non-IBM storage subsystems requiring backup and recovery support from the data center.

fig 2 Regional Data Center Backup and Recovery of Port Data

Virtualization software (like IBM’s SVC software) allows the regional data center to implement an architecture supporting a variety of server and storage devices, increasing its solution flexibility, improving the productivity of personnel and potentially reducing costs by allowing low-cost storage to address application requirements once supported only by traditional, enterprise, “monolithic” storage.

Time for Analysis
Once the data has been collected by the sensor network and stored in a safe location, the waterway information system can perform data analysis. The data analysis module is used to identify anomalies in waterway operations and provides warning of potential dangerous events or activity.
For each port environment, a normal background activity model is developed. The use of normalcy models allows for the detection of anomalous events to be subsequently investigated to determine their significance. The analysis model is based on innovative system concepts, which support closed-loop sensor control, for unsupervised training and application of anomaly detection algorithms. These concepts provide a solid, theoretic framework for control, modeling and detection, and are adaptable to various applications, including both port-ground and port-waterside surveillance—using combinations of ground, water and air-based sensors and commercial data streams. This module, a near-real-time system maps group and specific tactical threats to specific vulnerabilities and to emergency preparedness and response within the complex river environment.
To be successful, a waterway information system must integrate and implement a secure information system based on data from many disparate sources. Data sources must be integrated, secured and then managed to deliver a single view of all critical waterway navigational, environmental and B2B operational continuity issues. The system must integrate front-end sensor packages (including video and environmental), provide centralized (off-site) data center for disaster recovery and be endowed with a sophisticated data analysis package capable of detecting and reporting anomalies in waterway activities.

This article originally appeared in the April 2007 issue of Security Products pg. 70.

About the Author
Timothy D. Ringgold, Colonel, Army (Ret.), is the CEO of Defense Solutions, Inc., based in Washington, DC He can be reached at (610) 833-6000.

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