SAF: A Peer to Peer IoT LoRa System for Smart Supply Chain in Agriculture

Abstract

In the dairy industry farming as well as transportation conditions are paramount to product quality and to the overall supply chain resiliency. However, modern farms are complex installations with a broad spectrum of factors such as atmospheric conditions, including rain and humidity, ground composition, and highly irregular animal motion making difficult the deployment of digital telemetry systems. These conditions in turn translate to technical requirements including easy maintenance, scalability, wide coverage, low power consumption, strong signal resiliency, and high spatial resolution. Perhaps the best way to meet them is an LPWAN based IoT deployment. Along this line of reasoning, here is presented the architecture of SAF, an integrated IoT system built on LoRa technology for monitoring the supply chain of a dairy farm ensuring livestock and food safety with emphasis placed on monitoring the states of sheep, milk refrigerator, and milk trucks. LoRa was selected after an extensive comparison between the major latest generation LPWAN protocols. SAF is slated to be implemented in a local cooperative to monitor the production of protected designation of origin products.