Advanced Monitoring of Cold Chain Using Wireless Sensor Network and Sensor Cloud Infrastructure

The Internet of Things paradigm is a new research field which connects the physical world objects to the internet and allowing easy access to these objects in order to monitor and manage them. The objects are associated with unique identifiers and capability to transfer data over network without the intervention of humans and traditional computers. Wireless sensor networks play a major role in this paradigm in relating the physical object data to the internet. The wireless sensor networks are put together using low cost computing devices and embedded systems such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi and other RF systems. The Sensor cloud is a secondary form of cloud computing which enables the management of the physical world objects on cloud with features to store, process, visualize and share data from these objects. The sensor cloud is therefore becoming popular in providing an open, flexible and reconfigurable platform for many monitoring and controlling applications. This paper explores the idea of IoT to enable the monitoring of cold supply chain through the deployment of wireless sensor network in logistics and cold storage facilities and integrating them to the Xively sensor cloud for a complete monitoring and end-to-end visibility.