Exploiting Cost-Effective IoT Devices for Trustless Agri-Food Supply Chain Management: A Practical Case Study

The exponential rise in the adoption of diverse Internet of Things (IoT) devices has reached the Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chains. Small and cost-effective sensing IoT devices are fostering substantial research and innovation toward developing reliable, auditable, and transparent traceability systems. Current IoT-based traceability and provenance systems for Agri-Food supply chains are built on top of centralized infrastructures, introducing security and privacy issues such as data integrity, tampering, and single points of failure. In recent years, blockchain technology is attracting the interest of the IoT as a decentralized platform for a trusted record of information, realizing decentralized trustless systems. The inherent properties of this digital technology provide fault-tolerance, immutability, transparency, and full traceability of the stored transaction records. However, there has been little discussion on the role of cost-effective IoT devices in these blockchain-based systems. In this chapter, we propose an architecture for a blockchain-based traceability system for Agri-Food supply chain management. Our architecture seamlessly integrates cost-effective IoT devices producing and consuming digital data along the process. To effectively assess our proposal, we first defined a classical use case within the given vertical domain, namely from-farm-to-fork. Then, we deploy a full-fledged showcase using off-the-shelf constrained sensing devices and two different blockchain implementations. From a device perspective, we measure the overhead that our architecture introduces in the system in terms of memory and program space footprint, processing time, and power consumption. Our results show that cost-effective devices, with an internal clock running at less than 100 MHz, can support our proposed solution in both Ethereum and Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain networks.