Journal of Computer Science
Original Research Paper
Prison Perimeter Surveillance System Using WSN
1
Shereen Ismail, 2Eman Alkhader and 3Amal Ahmad
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
American University of Ras AlKhaimah,United Arab Emirates
2
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Jordan, Jordan
3
Department of Electrical Engineering /Computer and Communication,
Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan, Jordan
Corresponding Author:
Miss Shereen Ismail
Department of Computer
Science and Engineering,
American University of Ras
AlKhaimah, UAE
Email: shereen.subhi@aurak.ac.ae
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to introduce a prison hybrid surveillance
system using two main technologies; Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The system consists of three tiers;
Wireless Underground Sensor Network (WUSN) in tier 0, Wireless Ground
Sensor Network (WGSN) in tier 1 and Wireless Vision Sensor Network
(WVSN) in tier 2 that consists of surveillance towers and Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multimedia sensors. Those three tiers are
independent in operation and can complement one another in functionality.
Such a design that utilizes the most advanced technologies proves
performance in flexibility, scalability and hierarchical surveillance for a
high security prison or any other military site.
Keywords: Prison Surveillance, Wireless Sensor Networks, UAV,
Multicopters
Introduction
Today’s life security is a very important concern in
the world either for protection of critical infrastructures,
highly restricted areas or even any public places. Indeed,
the development of reliable and efficient security
systems becomes the main interest for many researchers.
For better achievement of security, advanced
technologies are designed for military, police forces or
security services uses. The aim of this paper is to invent
a security hybrid surveillance system for perimeter
patrols that can be applied around correctional facilities
and/or prisons. The proposed system is mainly based on
the use of Wireless Underground Sensor Network
(WUSN), Wireless Ground Sensor Network (WGSN),
Wireless Vision Sensor Network (WVSN) that consists
of surveillance towers and a special kind of Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs); multicopters or drones
equipped with high resolution multimedia sensors. The
proposed system is flexible enough to be applied for
security monitoring and surveillance in many other
emerging sites as we will discuss later.
Basically, current WSNs consist of hundreds or
thousands of intelligent tiny sensor nodes deployed
uniformly or randomly over certain geographical area
(Darabkh et al., 2012). Typically, these nodes deliver
their sensed data collaboratively to a base station then
the aggregated data to the main control operator room for
further processing and data analysis.
Actually, WSNs are well suited for long-term
environmental data acquisition. They have been
employed recently in a large spectrum of monitoring
applications such as habitat monitoring, military
intrusion detection, surveillance disaster management,
nuclear sites monitoring, rescue operations as well as
different civilian applications (Ismail et al., 2016),
because of many factors such as low cost, fast
deployment, long lifetime, low maintenance and high
quality of service (Ramadan and El-Rewini, 2009).
The objective in this work is to introduce a prison
hybrid surveillance system consists of three tiers where
WUSN is employed in tier 0, WGSN is used in tier 1 and
WVSN which consists of surveillance towers and
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with
multimedia sensors is utilized in tier 2. Those three tiers
are independent in operation and can complement one
another in functionality
In WUSN, where the sensors are buried at a shallow
depth underground and each one programmed with its
exact location allowing the determination of any
illegal movement to be easily achieved. Since their
presence is hidden underground, intruders would be
less likely to know about and thus take action to
disable the security system (Akyildiz and Stuntebeck,
2006). Usually pressure, acoustic, or magnetic sensors
are the most suitable to be used underground. In our
proposed system, we employed Magnetic Induction
© 2017 Shereen Ismail, Eman Alkhader and Amal Ahmad. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons
Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0 license.
Shereen Ismail et al. / Journal of Computer Science 2017, 13 (11): 674.679
DOI: 10.3844/jcssp.2017.674.679
applications. Firstly, sensor devices have the capability
of communicating with each other and the base station
up to the end control operator or the administrator
(Darabkh et al., 2012; Ismail et al., 2016; Ramadan and
El-Rewini, 2009). Generally, WSN is a network that is
formed when a set of intelligent sensor nodes are
deployed randomly or manually in a physical
environment to observe an event of interest. WSN
monitoring includes both indoor and outdoor
applications. The sensors in the vicinity of the event of
interest should be able to monitor it and deliver the
observed data to the base station.
Because of its wireless nature, WSNs have been
employed in military, rescue, environmental, civil and
healthcare applications. All these applications involve
monitoring and tracking a mobile target scenario where
in all of these applications the network sensors assigned
the task of continuously detecting, localizing and
reporting the positions of the mobile target to the base
station while it’s moving along a certain path.
Secondly, camera sensors have been recently
developed for collecting image/video information with high
resolution when used in such applications. Usually camera
sensors are attached on static surveillance towers for
monitoring and surveillance of interest areas such as
boundary lines, airports, coastal areas and other private or
public places with increased demands for protection against
penetration of intruders during day or/and night time even
under adverse weather conditions and over great distance.
Thirdly, multicopters or drones are special kind of
UAVs that recently represent an attractive choice to be
used in many emerging surveillance applications. Their
small sizes simplify the take-off and retrieval while
usually equipped with onboard autopilot and GPS
navigation system, cameras, Wi-Fi and other different
types of necessary sensors according to the intended
application. The autopilot system allows it to fly
autonomously to specific locations (i.e. drones) or
remotely controlled by a pilot at the ground control
station (i.e. RPVs). If the multicopter is equipped with
image/video camera, on board camera will be placed
underneath the multicopter and camera rotating
mechanism and corresponding controller are necessary
(Fetisov et al., 2012). Attached cameras can capture
any possible intruders (vehicles or persons) and send
the images or video stream back to the main processing
unit in the ground control station for further processing.
Afterwards, the administrator based on received
information can decide and manage delivering warning
alarms to the prison troops to move in case of any
illegal intrusion.
In this paper, we suggest a hybrid surveillance system
that utilizes these new emerging technologies. It
consists of 3 tiers; WUSN to monitor the underground
conditions, WGSN to detect the objects on ground,
WVSN based on the use of several multicopters that
(MI)-based wireless underground sensor networks as
we will see in the proposed system section.
On the other hand, WGSN is considered in tier 1 of
the proposed system in order to detect the intruder
entering the monitored area, estimate its location and
report the location information to the base station in
order to be delivered directly to the main control room
while the sensors keep tracking the positions’ estimate;
using an effective tracking algorithm; as the target
moves across a certain path. Adjacent sensor nodes often
monitor the same mobile intruder and collaborate to
estimate its location. The sensors in tier 1 are structured
based on clustering architecture with uniform grid
deployment. Most of the sensors are in sleep or hibernate
states most of the time to save battery energy and
increase the system lifetime (Ismail et al., 2015).
Furthermore, WVSN that consists of surveillance
towers and UAVs are employed in tier 2 of the proposed
system. Generally, UAVs have been defined as devices
used or intended to be used for flight in air that has no
onboard pilot. One type of UAVs could be configured
for autonomous flight with a pre-determined algorithm
and called multicopters or drones (Sun et al., 2011).
Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs) is another type that is
remotely controlled by ground operator. UAVs were
primarily
motivated
by
military
applications.
Afterwards, UAVs are intended to be used in a variety of
civilian and commercial applications such as 3D
mapping, people guidance in touristic places, rescue and
searching for missing people, firefighting, police raids,
agriculture and farming, photography, cars parking and
public areas monitoring.
In this paper, we will discuss one of the potential
applications of recently invented UAVs that serve as
mobile sensors; communicate through a wireless link
and equipped with cameras and any other attached
sensing devices in order to detect and track the line of
sight intruders in the perimeter of prisons or any
protected region that need to be secured by providing
visual (i.e. video and audio) information to the main
control operator room.
Coordinating various technologies in such a
system aims to achieve high security efficiency,
scalability and long lifetime monitoring. It provides a
flexible solution for prison perimeter monitoring or
any other critical military sites.
Brief Literature Review
With recent advancements in the development of
wireless communication and electronic devices, it is
possible to fabricate efficient technologies such as sensor
devices, high resolution cameras and UAVs that can be
coupled to build a hybrid system in order to be used for a
variety of new policing functions and extensive
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Shereen Ismail et al. / Journal of Computer Science 2017, 13 (11): 674.679
DOI: 10.3844/jcssp.2017.674.679
The Magnetic Induction (MI) communication
(Sun et al., 2011) is a promising signal propagation
technique in such a complicated medium, since the dense
medium does not cause higher attenuation rate of
magnetic fields than the rate in the air, the MI channel
conditions do not dramatically vary as the soil properties
change and MI communication can effectively transmit
and receive wireless signals using a small coil of wire.
In tier 0, because of the pre-deployment of
underground sensors at varying depths and due to the
main task of these sensors to detect any possible
intrusion, the tree-based network architecture seems to
be best suited for this purpose. We restrict the network
progress to the simply connected spanning trees, since it
is preferable to avoid circulating data in the network due
to the limited data rate in the underground
communication systems. As it is common in tree-based
architecture, each sensor root node not only transmits its
own sensed data, but also relays the data from the leave
nodes connected to it. For this, we apply a decode-andforward relaying scheme. The data from the whole
network is then guided to the base station node, which
retransmits the data to the main server in control operator
room for centralized processing and data analysis.
Tier 1 uses uniform grid deployment of sensors. The
sensors and the base station node; as the nodes in tier 0;
are all stationary after deployment and synchronized to a
global clock. The sensors in this tier use clustering
architecture. The clusters are formed dynamically
according to the detection of an approaching target. The
criterion in electing the CH is based on the distance
between the detecting sensor node and the mobile target.
The nearest to the target will be elected to be CH and
order to form a cluster then observe the target. These
CHs are autonomously connected with the base station to
relay the observed data. The base station aggregates
these data and sends it to the main server in the control
operator room. The main server provides long-term data
storage, interfaces for data access. Afterwards, the
administrator may activate UAVs in tier 2 for continuous
monitoring, providing live video feeds and to announce
warning alarms to guide prison troops for the place of
the detected intrusion if needed.
In case an intruder enters into the area, the nearest
node to the target forms a cluster by inviting the
surrounding nodes then keep localizing and tracking the
detected target. When the target leaves the cluster vicinity,
another cluster will be formed to keep tracking the target.
The algorithm used in this tier was previously proposed
and discussed in details in (Darabkh et al., 2012). Fig. 1
illustrates a general view of our proposed system in
which for tier 1, the nodes in brown color are the sensor
nodes and the nodes in red represent the currently
active cluster formed during the tracking process, as
mentioned previously.
cooperate to track any intruder within the prison perimeter
area. These devices in each use certain algorithm to
communicate with the main control operator in order to
eventually deliver and report the final data.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section
2 demonstrates our proposed system. In Section 3, the
hardware implementation is illustrated. The main
challenges when designing such a hybrid system is
discussed and well justified in Section 4. Section 5
concludes our paper with suggested future work.
Proposed System
Many studies are presented in literature for designing
secure surveillance systems for prison perimeter patrol
based on various approaches. For example, locks,
remote-controlled doors, pressure pads to detect
footfalls, normal CCTV and many other techniques
usually are used as independent layers.
In this paper, a prison hybrid surveillance system is
proposed that consists of three tiers independent in
operation and complement one another in functionality.
Fig. 1 shows the proposed system architecture. WUGN
that represents tier 0 to provide coverage under ground
surface, WGSN in tier 1 to detect any moving objects
above ground and surveillance towers and UAVs
equipped with multimedia sensors in tier 2, where the
surveillance towers provide accurate detection as well as
large detection range and UAVs provide intrusion
tracking capability to track the illegal intruder after they
have been detected by the tier 0 and 1 and improve the
accuracy of the system through visual information in
order to provide additional coverage and flexibility.
Tier 0 consists of underground vibration sensors
deployed manually at a shallow depth and can
communicate either with each other or with the base
station in a tree based architecture.
Deployed devices must be stationary, aware of their
location and synchronized to a global clock. It can detect
vibration activity that indicate the availability of an
intruder from a distance of 50 meter for human and
around 500 m for a vehicle. Since their presence is hidden
underground, intruders would be less likely to know about
and thus take any action to disable the system.
The possible complicated underground environment
that contains of soil, rocks, water and other possible
substances prevents the direct use of most existing
wireless solutions due to loosy channel characteristics
which is related to high level of attenuation and material
absorption loss, low propagation speed and limited
wireless communication range (Rault et al., 2014).
New physical layer techniques in signal propagation
have been recently used because of acceptable
communication performance through soil or concrete
medium, such as magnetic induction which makes use of
magnetic antennas implemented as coils to improve the
transmission range due to a much lower pathloss.
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DOI: 10.3844/jcssp.2017.674.679
Fig. 1: the proposed prison hybrid surveillance system
returned back to the idle state. On the other hand, in case
the surveillance towers receive any alarm from the
control operator room, multimedia sensors near the area
of interest will be directed automatically to that section
of coverage according to the coordinates received within
the alarm notification in order to confirm or deny the
existence of any intrusion. At the same time, at least one
UAV is dispatched according to the administrator
decision in order to keep following that intruder and
send continuous real time video streaming to the main
control room. Consequently, prison troops and security
guards can effectively move and catch the intruder.
In other cases, the surveillance towers may not be
enough to locate any possible intrusion; i.e. dead zones; if
the intruders will look for areas and times not properly
covered by adjacent towers as Fig. 1 shows. In such a case,
it is recommended to operate and lunch multi UAVs in
order to achieve the required coverage. All the UAVs must
be remotely connected with the control operator in a star
topology for a low-latency communication.
Due to climbing capacity, reliability, ease of control,
flight stability and high mobility of UAVs, the intensive
human involvement in flat surveillance activities can be
Tier 0 and 1 base stations send their aggregated data
to the main control operator, which, in turn, analyzes this
data to take the appropriate action and activate the proper
devices of tier 2.
In tier 2, surveillance towers equipped with
multimedia sensors monitor the vital signs of any
possible intruders, check the perimeter area and inform
the operator room in case of any intrusion. On the
other hand, it may be alarmed by the control operator
that there is an intrusion within its vicinity based on the
received data from tier 0 and 1 nodes so it is used to
activate its cameras (night vision) in order to confirm or
deny detecting the intruder within that area. The use of
surveillance towers can quickly find and locate the
intrusion by analyzing real time video sequences and
assisting the administrator in realizing more accurate
detection. The multimedia sensors on the surveillance
towers that detect any vital signs of intruder availability
will report the detection results to the remote
administrator in the control operator room. These
multimedia sensors will easily and accurately help to
characterize the intruder, e.g., human, vehicle or a wild
animal. In case of fault alarm, the system will be
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DOI: 10.3844/jcssp.2017.674.679
reduced. This allows valuable human resources to be
allocated to decision management activities, based on the
received information from such devices. However, harsh
weather conditions; such as clouds, fog or dust; can also
impinge on the surveillance capability of UAVs.
Moreover, as we stated earlier, UAVs could be
configured with predetermined algorithm or preprogrammed with certain GPS coordinates or flight plans
to move regularly in 3D within the perimeter space so
can autonomously patrol the area in case of any expected
security threat. Any detected intruder will be tracked
using measurements from multiple UAVs (i.e. cameras)
that do not have direct communication between each
other and only communicate directly with the UAV pilot
at the ground control station.
On the other hand, as each sensor in tier 0 and tier 1
is programmed with its location information as it is
deployed, the exact location of any illegal crossing is
easily determined in the first place in collaboration.
These sensors are intended to keep tracking the detected
intruder until the area of the event can be covered by the
nearest surveillance tower then number of UAVs is
activated and take off for continuous visual tracking.
horizontally. On the other hand, fixed wing UAV system
will probably be able to fly a distance of 50 km with the
same battery storage. But it requires much more space
for starting and landing. Silent UAVs are best suited for
such an application. To achieve the required silence,
UAV should be 30 meter on average above
groundsurface to prevent the unmanned vehicle from
being heard.
Attached to the surveillance towers, the camera
sensors that play an important role to provide visual
information in order to determine the intrusion identity.
We assume that a thermo cameras for night time
operation and a VIS camera for daylight operation are
the best suited for such a system.
Conclusion and Future Work
Recently, the new technologies; such as WSN and
UAVs; have been employed in many critical applications
(Felemban, 2013.) like:
•
Hardware Implementation
•
In this section, we are going to describe the main
features and basic functionalities of the different
hardware components of the proposed system.
It is noteworthy to state that the combination of
WUSN, WGSN, surveillance towers and UAVs in such a
hybrid system will provide additional input and
unattended data sources to achieve the required coverage.
In tier 1, ultrasonic motion sensors have been installed.
Indeed, such sensors; under some conditions; mayprone to
false alarms another type of detection system may be
required to compliment the ultrasound system.
Since skilled intruders know how to pass through
space without making highly audible sounds, in this
system we suggest to use ultrasonic sensors in
conjunction with passive infrared sensors to increase
sensitivity especially at critical crossing points (i.e., near
entrance and egress points). Newer models combine both
technologies within one system.
The type of UAVs in tier 2 is highly dependent on the
perimeter area in which for example, multirotor do not
need a lot of space for starting or landing (both
automatically possible). While quadrocopter (4
motors/propellers) using a 10 Ah battery and efficient
motors that will be able to fly 30-45 min; depending on
the payload which represent the onboard autopilot and
GPS navigation, cameras, Wi-Fi and any other types of
sensors with approximate speed ranges from 5 to 10 m/s.
If we assume the speed is 5 m/s, this means
approximately 12 km of flight distance can be crossed
•
•
•
•
Environmental monitoring: for example, forest
detection, habitat monitoring and animal tracking,
flood detection, intelligent irrigation, forecasting
and weather prediction
Commercial applications for example, seismic
activities prediction and monitoring
Military applications: for example, enemy tracking,
borders patrol and security purposes
Health applications, such as Tracking and
monitoring of patients and doctors
Transport systems such as monitoring of traffic,
dynamic routing management and car parking
management
Industrial applications: for example, automated
systems monitoring
Due to the rapid concern on employing new
technologies to achieve high security systems, we
proposed in this paper a hybrid system using various
emerging technologies for prison surveillance and
perimeter patrol. The system consists three independent
tiers: WUSN in tier 0 that uses tree based architecture,
WGSN in tier 1 that is based on clustering architecture
while we use surveillance towers and UAV technology
in tier 2 equipped with multimedia sensors to achieve the
maximum coverage.
As a future work, other parameters can be considered
to study the system performance out of which, the effect
of intruder speed on such a system, the rate of false alarm
especially for tier 0 and 1 and merging new surveillance
techniques in such a hybrid system to achieve the
maximum security and the required coverage.
For such a design, many challenges may rise such as
communication and hardware reliability as the case with
WUSN in tier 0, the real time video streaming
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DOI: 10.3844/jcssp.2017.674.679
synchronization and autofollow setup on UAVs in tier 2
to keep tracking the intruder object will it is moving, and
system accuracy and security especially when various
technologies have been used for such a hybrid system.
Ismail, S.S., E.I. Al Khader and K.A. Darabkh, 2015.
Static clustering for target tracking in wireless
sensor networks. Global J. Technol.
Ramadan, R. and H. El-Rewini, 2009. Deployment of
sensing devices: A survey. Southern Methodist
University, USA.
Rault, T., A. Bouabdallah and Y. Challal, 2014. Energy
efficiency in wireless sensor networks: A top-down
survey. Computer Netw., 67: 104-122.
DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2014.03.027
Sun, Z., P. Wang, M.C. Vuran, M.A. Al-Rodhaan and
A.M. Al-Dhelaan et al., 2011. MISE-PIPE:
Magnetic induction-based wireless sensor networks
for underground pipeline monitoring. Ad Hoc
Netw., 9: 218-227.
DOI: 10.1016/j.adhoc.2010.10.006
Sun, Z., P. Wanga, M.C. Vuran, M.A. Al-Rodhaan and
A.M. Al-Dhelaan et al., 2011. BorderSense: Border
patrol through advanced wireless sensor networks.
Ad Hoc Netw., 9: 468-477.
DOI: 10.1016/j.adhoc.2010.09.008
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to the American University of Ras Al
Khaimah for providing incentive fund for this research
work and for covering the fees of its publication.
Author’s Contributions
Shereen Ismail: She conceived and planned the
presented idea, supervised the findings of this work, and
coordinating the work among co-authors.
Eman Alkhader: She contributed to the data
gathering task and collaborated with the first author in
designing the idea.
Amal Ahmad: She was responsible for collocting the
experimental data. Also, she participated in the writing
and proofreading of this manuscript.
Disclosures
There is no conflict of interests regarding the
publication of this paper. We also confirm that funding in
the "Acknowledgment" section did not lead to any conflict
of interests regarding the publication of this manuscript.
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