Millions of cargo containers are transported around
the world and over 25,000 cargo containers arrive at US ports
every day. Each container has to be identified and monitored for
security and also for the integrity of the cargo, called condition
sensing. This research looks at the current methods used for
monitoring and identification. A wireless sensor based monitoring
system over the IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee protocol is proposed for
the condition sensing. The design of an efficient low-cost wireless
ZigBee to Wi-Fi Bridge Interface incorporating a 128-bit AES
data encryption security module in hardware is described. The
proposed design provides a low-cost robust self-contained bridge
solution that allows inter-network communication between the
sensor network and the IEEE 802.11b wireless network. Xilinx
Spartan 3A FPGA evaluation board is chosen as a platform
for the bridge interface design, and implemented using Xilinx
Embedded Development Kit (EDK) for overall embedded system
design and development, ISE for FPGA hardware development,
and Mentor Graphics ModelSim for design verification