Remote Asset Monitoring
Continuous telemetry from deployed assets beyond terrestrial coverage
The Challenge
Military and commercial operations deploy assets — vehicles, generators, fuel caches, supply containers, weather stations, navigation aids, communication relays — in remote locations far beyond terrestrial communication coverage. These assets require continuous monitoring: position tracking, status reporting, environmental sensing, maintenance alerts, and security monitoring. Current solutions use expensive SATCOM terminals with monthly subscription costs that make monitoring economically prohibitive for low-value assets, or rely on periodic manual inspection that allows failures and theft to go undetected for days or weeks. The ideal solution provides continuous, low-cost telemetry from any location on earth with minimal equipment cost and power consumption.
How the 25-Byte Constraint Solves It
The 25-byte Mustard Envelope makes it economically viable to monitor every deployed asset, regardless of value. A complete telemetry report — position, battery voltage, temperature, humidity, door/tamper status, operational hours — fits in a single 25-byte envelope transmitted via the cheapest available satellite burst. At $0.01-0.05 per message, continuous hourly reporting from a remote asset costs $8-40 per month in satellite airtime. Queue Burst handles telemetry scheduling, batching routine reports and prioritizing alarm conditions. Mustard Chain provides tamper-evident asset logs: every telemetry report is chained to its predecessor, creating an auditable history that proves the asset's condition over time. This is particularly valuable for supply chain integrity — proving that temperature-sensitive supplies maintained cold chain compliance, or that fuel reserves were not tampered with between inspections.
Protocols Applied
- Mustard Envelope — Compact telemetry encoding for low-cost satellite transmission
- Queue Burst — Telemetry scheduling with alarm prioritization
- Mustard Chain — Tamper-evident asset history for supply chain integrity
- Remoteness Index — Asset vulnerability scoring based on location
- Herald — Domain-specific encoding for diverse sensor types
- MustardTree — Transport optimization based on asset location and available connectivity
📋 Provisional Patent App #63/999,220 — Constrained Transport Envelope
📋 Provisional Patent App #64/005,012 — Tamper-Evident Bilateral Micro-Ledger
Frequently Asked Questions
What types of sensors can be monitored?
Herald's semantic encoding supports any sensor type that produces structured data: GPS position, temperature, humidity, pressure, voltage, current, vibration, magnetic field, acoustic level, door/tamper switches, and custom analog/digital inputs. Adding a new sensor type requires only a new semantic model in Herald — no changes to the transport infrastructure.
What is the per-asset monitoring cost?
With the 25-byte Mustard Envelope transmitted via Iridium SBD, per-message costs range from $0.01-0.15 depending on volume commitments. Hourly reporting costs approximately $8-110/month per asset. Event-triggered reporting (transmit only on state change or alarm) reduces costs further. The protocol stack's communication module uses commodity satellite modems ($50-200), making total per-asset hardware cost a fraction of traditional SATCOM solutions.
Can this prove supply chain integrity?
Yes. Mustard Chain creates a tamper-evident record of every telemetry report. For cold chain compliance, the temperature history is cryptographically chained — any modification to historical temperature readings breaks the hash chain and is detectable. Mustard Seal can publish periodic chain commitments for third-party verification by inspectors, regulators, or customers.
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