Four vendors remain in the running to win the contract from the Department of Homeland Security to secure America's borders. Ericsson, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have submitted proposals that are under review. The project is one part of a $10billion integrated wireless network from DHS and the Treasury and Justice departments.

An obvious major concern is how to deal with a huge amount of data from each sensor and camera, more data than all the eyeballs in the world could process. The solution proposed: use wireless sensors to trigger cameras and other devices when an event of interest occurs. A major challenge will be the development and deployment of such a large scale system with potentially hundreds of thousands of wireless nodes in harsh environmental conditions. While the article focuses on video surveillance, the real win is the acknowledgement that a tiered network utilizing miniature wireless sensors will be required for any system to be feasible.

Washington Technology published a feature article today about the project with a follow up letter from the editor.

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