The latest “fidayeen” terror strike on the front line Indian Air Force base at Pathankot early on Saturday, Jan 02, 2015 is the second major “Cross-Border Infiltration-cum-Attack” to take place in Indian Punjab’s Gurdaspur-Pathankot belt in the last six months. In this analysis, we will focus on possible deployment of a "Hybrid Combination of Wireless Sensor Network" integrated with "Quick Reaction Team’s Operation Base" and try to decode the possible infiltration routes of Pathankot Air Base Attack, which could have been stopped from happening at the first place itself.
By IndraStra Global Editorial Team
The latest “fidayeen” terror strike on the front line Indian Air Force base at Pathankot early on Saturday early morning (Jan 02, 2016) is the second major “Cross-Border Infiltration-cum-Attack” to take place in Indian Punjab’s Gurdaspur-Pathankot belt in the last six months.
Image Attribute: An Indian Border
Security Force (BSF) soldier patrols near the fenced border with Pakistan amid
fog in Suchetgarh, southwest of Jammu, Jan 10, 2013. / Source: Dawn.com
Though a large
portion of the India-Pakistan border on the 553-km Gurdaspur-Jammu sector is
fenced, there are several gaps caused by the Ravi river and season rivulets
that cut into the international boundary. Former General
V.K Singh has clearly mentioned in is his book “Courage and Conviction” about the
Basantar-Devak River which is the most vulnerable stretch of Indo-Pakistan
Border, situated within the proximity of Samba, roughly between Mammun
and Pathankot. It’s easy to infiltrate from this stretch as compared to the heavily-mined and guarded Line of Control as well as the international border in neighboring Jammu and Kashmir state.
Currently, the Gurdaspur-Pathankot-Samba sector is complying with "Ditch-cum-Bunker / Ditch-cum-Bund" defence concept.
Jointly manned by Indian Army and Border Security Force (BSF), the whole system consists of Liner
defence elements, built to create tactical obstacles in a terrain which was all
flat ground [1]. These defences, combined with the existing natural ground
features make large-scale mechanized operations virtually impossible.
The primary
objective to have such system at place to impose time penalty on any ground attacking
force including tanks and armored vehicles. However, the system itself doesn't provide a fool-proof border security. However, in case of an emergency; this
kind of system will affect defending army’s operations and pose hurdles for
their forward movement.
Since couple of years, India was trying to formulate a high-octane "Border Space
Command Plan" which primarily includes the construction of more than 500 border posts along the
frontiers with Pakistan and Bangladesh. The government also intend to purchase
electronic surveillance equipment, such as night-vision devices, hand-held IR thermal imagery devices, battlefield surveillance radars, direction finders, unattended
ground sensors and high-powered telescopes.
Currently, India's border management system is excessively manpower intensive and mainly
uses fences along with unattended ground sensors across the sections of the
15,000-kilometer border. However, the fences are not foolproof, and the sensors
have not responded on several occasions, said a source in the border
paramilitary force.
On October 2015,
Indian Army has objected to the government’s plan to build an embankment along
the 179-km stretch of the International Border in Jammu district [2]. The plan
to build the another embankment (better known as ditch-cum-bund) was cleared in
2013 by the then UPA government after the twin terror attacks in
Hiranagar/Samba sector the same year, and around 20 per cent of the required
land has been acquired for the project. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is
implementing the project and the embankment will be constructed under the
supervision of the Border Security Force (BSF). The Army already mans another
embankment, a few kilometers behind the international border. Their main
contention is that if at all there is a war-like situation, they will not be
able to handle the situation. It is the BSF that is deployed on this
179-km-long stretch, and the Army provides back-up in an emergency.
Need for Hybrid Wireless Sensor Network
Multimedia, Ground, Mobile, and Underground Sensors for Effective Border Patrol.
One of the key advantages of deploying an integrated wireless sensor
networks (WSN) is their ability to bridge the gap between the physical and
logical worlds, by gathering certain useful information from the physical world
and communicating that information to more powerful logical devices that can
process it. WSN will eventually eliminate the need for human intervention in
many information gathering and monitoring applications, especially in confined
or dangerous spaces.
The low-cost and small size features of WSN will enable the deployment of
hundreds of nodes in any field of interest. Such huge density allows more dense
collection of data in spatial and temporal domains. Sensor nodes contains of
three main parts:
1) Processing unit;
2) RF transceiver; and
3) Energy source.
Multiple sensor nodes self-form themselves to form a network to exchange information and deliver data to a common node called the sink node.
Figure 1. FleGSens - Hybrid
combination of multimedia, ground, mobile,
and underground sensors for border
patrol.
FleGSens is a
wireless sensor network for the surveillance of critical areas [3], funded by the German Federal Office for Information
Security (BSI). The
FleGSens application provides several protocols that ensure the secure
detection of trespassers even if an attacker compromises a limited number of
sensor nodes. Protocol performance was investigated first by an extensive set
of simulations in different scenarios and then by application in a test bed.
In
general, the results of the simulations and the real-world experiments closely
resemble each other. The trespass detection protocol shows the location of all
trespassers independent of their paths as soon as the duty cycle allows for
sending messages. The node failure detection protocol assures that all nodes
monitor a subset of neighbours and detects all node failures once the threshold
of missed messages is exceeded. The parameters are adjustable to the
requirements of the application to achieve lower detection durations, lower
false positive rates and support the use of duty cycling. Attacks are either
detected by non-compromised nodes or they have no effect on the employed
protocols.
Eventually, Providing a full coverage while minimizing the cost has been an active area of research in the operational research field. In order to reduce coverage overlap between sensors, optimization methods should be used to select the best placement of the sensor nodes in the field [4-6]. J. He and H. Shi [7] developed a distributed algorithm to optimize the location of sensor nodes along a barrier to minimize the cost of the full coverage. In [8], the authors examined how to reposition a mobile sensor network efficiently within a specified region to recover a security hole and prevent intruders from exploiting this hole. Yang and Qiao proposed a multi-round approach to deploy sensor nodes to guarantee barrier coverage [9].
To know more about WSN Implementation – THE PAPER | Application of Wireless Sensor Network Technology in Advanced Border Intrusion Detection & Surveillance
Conclusion:
Managing the
border is important for not only maintaining the security of the India, but
also reducing the workload of the Indian Army, which is fighting a
low-intensity war with terrorists and insurgents across all the fonts. In such scenario, a Hybrid Combination of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can be an optimum solution with two of the promising application includes border surveillance and intrusion detection applications. The main advantage of using WSN in such applications is the high spatial and temporal data resolution results from deploying hundreds of low-cost networked sensor nodes along borders. The importance of providing integrity and security service for the border monitoring network has been firstly introduced in [11]. However, more research should be done to tackle many issues, such as providing security for different topologies and different kinds of sensor networks.
References:
[1] General V.K Singh “Courage and Conviction”
[2] The Hindu, October 7, 2015 “Army opposes Home Ministry’s border
embankment plan”
[3] Peter Rothenpieler, Daniela Kruger, Dennis Pfisterer, Stefan Fischer “FleGSens — Secure Area Monitoring Using Wireless Sensor Networks” World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Electrical, Computer, Energetic, Electronic and Communication Engineering Vol:3, No:8, 2009
[4] Luo, et al., “Ship Detection with Wireless Sensor Networks,” IEEE
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol. 23, No. 7, 2012, pp.
1336-1343.doi:10.1109/TPDS.2011.274
[5] A. Mishra, K. Sudan and H. Soliman, “Detecting Border Intrusion Using
Wireless Sensor Network and Artificial Neural Network,” IEEE DCOSS 2010, Santa
Barbara, 21- 23 June 2010.
[6] P. Rothenpieler, D. Kruger, D. Pfisterer, S. Fischer, D. Dudek, C.
Haas, A. Kuntz and M. Zitterbart, “Flegsens: Secure Area Monitoring Using
Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the 4th Safety and Security Systems
in Europe, 2009.
[7] J. He, R. A.
Norwood, M. Fallahi and N. Peyghambarian, “Solar-Powered Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor
Network for Border Surveillance,” SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 2012.
[8] J. He and H.
Shi, “Constructing Sensor Barriers with Minimum Cost in Wireless Sensor
Networks,” Journal of Parallel Distributed Computing, Vol. 72, No. 12, 2012,
pp. 1654-1663. doi:10.1016/j.jpdc.2012.07.004
[9] G. Yang and
D. Qiao “Multi-Round Sensor Deployment for Guranteed Barrier Coverage,” IEEE
INFOCOM 2010.
[10] E. Felemban, S.
Vural, et al., “SAMAC: A Cross-Layer Communication Protocol for Sensor Networks
with Sectored Antennas,” IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol. 9, No. 8,
2010, pp. 1072-1088. doi:10.1109/TMC.2010.61
