An Experimental Study of Signal Propagation and Network Performance in Monitoring of Food Transportation

Food transportation, as an important division in logistics, requires thorough environmental surveillance, which can be realized with wireless sensor network (WSN) technology. However, the monitoring of the transported products is hindered by high signal attenuation due to the content of food products. Accessibility of thorough environmental information inside a packed cargo container is therefore only possible by using multi hop protocols. According to the results of field tests, bananas cause high signal attenuation compared to the air. Therefore, multi hop protocols are needed in banana transportation scenarios with containers. Minimizing the power consumption of sensor motes is also significant considering the time of transportation that can be from several days to weeks. Further work will be focused on analysing the performance of signal propagation to set up a radio propagation model in cargo containers, whereas multi hop protocol will be further perfected to realize better aggregation of data.