A RFID-enabled Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Monitoring System for Biological and Pharmaceutical Products

Abstract

Biological and pharmaceutical (B&P) products are essential and important for human being. In current era, the demand and requirement of these products are dramatically growing; product quality and integrity then become the most concerning part. As a key factor for ensuring the quality and integrity, the current product status monitoring system needs to be enhanced in a more sophisticated and comprehensive way. This research aims to design a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enabled Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) monitoring system for B&P products supply chain management. In this study, the basic design factors of a WSN are reviewed. It is found that battery capacity causes a bottle neck in the WSN. Therefore, system architecture is presented based on the proposed framework. The framework aims to develop a common approach to improve the energy efficiency of the WSN. It consists of three processes, the first one is to generate a WSN with full coverage; the second one is to determine the optimal position of the sink, and the last process is to add additional relay nodes for recharging or replacing the battery-exhausted nodes without affecting the network operation. Finally, a simulated case about B&P product storage in a hospital is conducted to show the overall procedures of the framework.