Who needs The Club when you've got SVATS!

According a report by the FBI, a vehicle is stolen every 26.4 seconds in the United States. The western states account for the highest rate of thefts in the USA, and 4 of the top 10 metropolitan areas were in California - made me feel very safe! Remember 'the club' from back in the day? I remember watching the commercials when I was a kid between episodes of Saved by the Bell and thinking that my parents should get one - it seemed like the perfect solution. Check out this commercial from the nineties (love the hairstyles and outfits).



Luckily today, things have progressed, and instead of having to whip out your club and strap it to the steering wheel of your car, you can install SVATS. SVATS is a sensor-network-based vehicle anti-theft system based on Crossbow's MICA2 Mote platform. Conceptualized by researchers at Penn State University, SVATS is designed to address the limitations of high cost, high false-alarm rate and the easy disabling function of current tracking/alarming systems. In this system, the vehicles in an area are outfitted with a sensor node and form a wireless sensor network. The nodes in the network then monitor and identify possible vehicle thefts by detecting unauthorized vehicle movement. When an unauthorized movement is detected, an alert is sent to the base station which sends warning messages to the security office or whomever is responsible for that area. The security system relies on networks of cars constantly gossiping with their neighbors using the concealed wireless nodes. The cars raise the alarm when a thief tries to make a getaway.

With vehicles playing an essential part in our every day life, there are many solutions to stop theft from lock systems (like the club), alarm systems (that we all ignore nowadays) and vehicle tracking/recovery systems. Most of these tracking/recovery systems require the user to purchase the product as well as pay a monthly maintenance fee, or use GPS which does not work indoors or is easily located and disabled. SVATS proposes to have a each vehicle equipped with a node, and each parking area forming its own sensor network with base station. Each node is powered by the vehicle's power source and controlled by a remote so that the user can turn it on so that the node sends a 'join' message and broadcasts its 'alive' message periodically. If it does not send out a 'leave' message that is authenticated by the user via remote that turns the node off, the neighboring sensors will detect the movement or should they not receive the 'leave' message report the problem to the base station and owner via alert. To track the vehicle SVATS used roadside access points already deployed to determine where the vehicle had been moved to. The researchers themselves drove off some cars to test how the system worked, and found that SVATS detected all such "thefts" in a matter of just 4 to 9 seconds. The system was apparently resistant to false alarms caused by weather, or people walking around the car park, both of which can affect the signals between sensors.

SVATS included four components network topology management, vehicle theft detection, intra-vehicle networking, and alert reporting. Using the MICA2 Mote platform in the sensor node for this deployment, researchers were able to use the self-forming, ad-hoc capability of the Motes to allow the device to find its neighbors and join the network. The vehicle theft detection was done with two techniques - count-based and statistical-based. RSSI signals and values were also used to determine whether a vehicle had been stolen or not. The system can also detect when a car is moving unexpectedly by measuring the signal strength of any "alive" messages. If a car detects significant changes in signal strength, it sends a warning message to other cars monitoring the same vehicle, because it is likely to be moving. However, it is only when a watching car receives more than three such warning signals from different sources that it will send out a theft alarm message to the base station. Ensuring that multiple cars must agree on a threat before the alarm is raised should cut out the false alarms that plague other anti-theft systems, say the researchers. Experimental evaluation of the SVATS system used a laptop as a base station and one sensor per vehicle in a Penn State parking lot.  The base station transmitted once per second while the vehicle sensors sent live messages every 200 milliseconds.

The key to SVATS is that the sensor nodes are cheap and easy to deploy. They are designed to work in a large network that creates a smart and safe environment. This solution can be deployed incrementally and the rapid response time it provides is motivation enough to install the SVATS sensor nodes. This research was funded by NSF and the Army research office. The researchers presented information on their system at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineer's Infocom 2008 Conference in Phoenix.  

As one person said, stealing a car wont be easy for thieves anymore, thanks to this new type of car alarm that enables the vehicles to look after each other"s safety - just like a herd of animals under any potential threat from predators.