Wireless sensor network for real-time perishable food supply chain management

•The WSN nodes can monitor both environmental parameters and the states of motion.•The WSN system is configurable according the requirements of applications.•The non-joined EndDevice improved by network switching scheme is more energy-efficient.•The functions and WSN nodes have been tested and validated with an external apparatus.•The success rate of data communication is over 99%.

Environment monitoring is essential to the perishable food supply chain management, since it provides important information to estimate the food quality and to predict its shelf life. In this work, a real-time perishable food supply chain monitoring system is developed based on ZigBee-standard wireless sensor network (WSN). Some important improvements including a configurable architecture for comprehensive sensors and an improved network switching scheme are designed to meet the application requirements. A tree-topology WSN system with 192 EndDevices and a star-topology WSN system with 80 EndDevices are implemented and evaluated in terms of both functions and performance. Test results show that the success rate of data communication is over 99%. Both theoretical analysis and realistic measurement results show that the EndDevices have a lifetime long enough for the application of supply chain monitoring.