Sensing Technologies for Homeland Security in Cloud Environments

Managing emergency situations, avoiding security attacks, dealing with homeland security in general are crucial problems of our society, still looking for a comprehensive and effective solution. On one hand the level of security of a territory can be increased by deploying several monitoring cameras and sensors able to capture new physical parameters and using the Internet as the communication infrastructure. On the other, such monitoring and alerting systems are independent one from the other and a joint integration strategy is still missing. Cloud Computing may provide a valid support to Homeland Security needs, especially for processing and storing the huge amount of data generated from the thousands of heterogeneous kind of sensors deployed all around. In this work we introduce a new Cloud architecture able to deal with different types of virtual elements, logically belonging to Cooperating Clouds, treated and manipulated in a seamless manner. Sensing technologies are part of such architecture and represent virtual resources to be dynamically allocated as it happens with computing and storage. The description of a Use-Case related to the Homeland Security, that is the Transportation of Dangerous Goods, helps us to better describe our Cloud architecture, highlighting its features and peculiarities.