Intrusion Detection System using Wireless Sensor Networks

Absar-ul-Hasan1, Ghalib A. Shah2 & Ather Ali3,
1,3National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
2Center for Advanced Research in Engineering, Islamabad Pakistan
ABSTRACT: Ground monitoring of areas of high strategic value is necessary in today’s security sensitive world. Often, military setups require tight security cordons to be established around large encampments to protect any intruder, malicious attacker or saboteur from entering the premises and compromising its security. Such monitoring requires 24 / 7 watch over the area for long durations and a high degree of stealthiest. At the same time, cost, reliability and longevity are the fundamental requirements of such a monitoring system. Hence, the ability to monitor an area for intrusion detection by using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is of great practical importance. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system capable of reliable, robust and efficient monitoring for human intrusion detection. The system allows a group of cooper-ative but autonomous sensory devices forming a wireless network to detect human presence within the dep-loyment area and also track the positions of moving target. We evaluate the performance of the system con-sisting up to 30 nodes that includes MicaZ motes and also our custom built low cost sensor nodes. Performance results show that how the custom designed sensor nodes perform equally well and coexist with MicaZ motes. Finally, through this paper, we share our experiences and the valuable lessons learned in de-veloping such a complete running system.
1. INTRODUCTION
Security is today one of the primary concerns around the world. Recent trends have shown that surveil-lance of tactically important areas for suspicious ac-tivities is a high priority for organizations. Despite technological advances, the major threat that still lurks is from unauthorized humans who can gain access to a target location and compromise its inte-grity. This results in surveillance of key areas for possible intrusion to be one of the most desired goals for security. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are one of the most contemporary and suc-cessful technique used for environmental monitoring of certain physical parameters. WSNs can be effec-tively used to gather useful data from the physical environment they are deployed in and communicat-ing that information wirelessly to base stations which can process it and extract useful information.
WSNs are envisioned to reduce, and eventually, completely eliminate human involvement in infor-mation gathering in certain applications [1]. Howev-er, they have their own limitations, the most impor-tant of which is the amount of energy available to a sensor node. With slow progress in energy scaveng-ing, the current solutions need to be very energy-efficient; using the minimum amount of energy while having the maximum useful throughput. Other major challenges faced by WSNs are tamper resistance, unobtrusiveness and real-time constraints
Despite these limitations, WSNs do have the advan-tage of deploying sensors in hostile environments autonomously. This fulfills a very important need for
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any real time monitoring, especially in remote sce-narios. These advantages and disadvantages of WSNs compel development of a system which can be deployed and tested in the real-time environment. Evaluations done through simulations tend to make simplified assumptions which fail to hold well in practice rendering the simulated systems incomplete. Simulation does, however, give an in-sight on the operation of such systems under ideal conditions, which can be a scale to measure the results achieved in real world scenarios [2].
In this paper, we describe our effort in designing and implementing a system on a network of up to 30 sensor nodes, with at least half of them being MicaZ motes and the rest our own designed sensor nodes. The primary goal is to build a system, which is able to reliably and stealthily detect human presence, and track the movement pattern of the human within the sensor network with minimum cost, size and energy consumption. The core of the system is use of the Passive Infrared (PIR) sensors, which are interfaced to the MicaZ motes and custom designed sensor nodes. PIR sensor responds to the infrared radiation of the human body and is quite reliable in determin-ing human presence within its sensing range [3], [4].
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the application scenario i.e. ap-plication requirements for which this system is im-plemented. Section III describes the