Iridium Satellite and Impeva Labs will expand their current collaboration in the implementation of a real-time container monitoring, tracking and security system on behalf of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). PANYNJ recently awarded a contract to Impeva Labs as part of the federal Operation Safe Commerce (OSC) Phase III. Iridium and Impeva Labs have collaborated during the past four years in several platforms and products. This phase of field trials of Impeva's Global Sentinel system, which utilizes the Iridium constellation for global communications, will begin in December 2005.
The PANYNJ contract to validate the Impeva system is part of Operation
Safe Commerce (OSC), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security program trialing
technology and commercial practices to make container shipping safer. PANYNJ
is concentrating on testing internal sensor technology that tracks and reports
a container's global location and detects if someone breaks into the box in
transit. Of specific interest to PANYNJ is the ability to use sensors,
intelligent processing and wireless communication systems to receive reports
on the global location and condition of containers. The Impeva system
securely notifies the PANYNJ within minutes of a container experiencing an
abnormal event -- unauthorized entry, mishandling, environmental extremes,
route deviation or unscheduled delay -- regardless of location. PANYNJ will
work with two companies in Germany and Jordan to "stress test" the Impeva
system for reliability and effectiveness by having these firms use Impeva's
Global Sentinel security module on
their container shipments. The port
hopes to use the Impeva system to evaluate at least 1,000 container loads over
the next year.
The Impeva monitoring system is based on the Global Sentinel, a rugged
wireless module that mounts easily inside containers. The module is capable
of integrating a variety of sensor types and a GPS receiver as well as
intelligently processing sensor data and event identification. For the PANYNJ
testing, Iridium's constellation of 66 low-earth orbiting satellites will be
one of the primary means of global data transmission besides multi-band
cellular and wireless LAN. The Global Sentinel communicates securely
with the Impeva Device Management Center (DMC) to provide immediate and
continuous reporting of location, condition and security status as required,
without deployment of costly infrastructure.