An RFID-Enabled Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Monitoring System for Biological and Pharmaceutical Products

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.