Performance Analysis of a Blockchain for a Traceability System Based on the IoT Sensor Units Along the Agri-Food Supply Chain

IoT sensors in the agri-food industry are always more in use day by day. Different advanced solutions are considered for monitoring some stages of the supply chain, particularly the agricultural or farming phases. A solution that is able to monitor the whole supply chain and all the different products along it does not actually exist. Therefore, this work is mainly focused on the entire agri-food supply chain in order to prevent fraud and damage to the food products. In this perspective, the IoT sensors – installed into the critical points of the supply chain – provided valuable data to record on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform. IoT sensors could also be installed as edge devices to provide automatic generation of the list of devices present in the system, without adding information manually. Data was collected in a cloud environment, in order to make the system further flexible, reducing the cost of an eventual IT infrastructure. Through the use of a specific smart contract, called “Foodchain” written in the Go language, it was possible to analyze a more general solution. The blockchain network proposed takes into account all possible actors of the agri-food supply chain, from farm to fork and vice versa. In particular, this work evaluated the network’s performance in terms of throughput, latency, and scalability. Some interesting results, above all regarding scalability, have been achieved with the use of Google virtual machines, which represented the different actors of the supply chain. Eventually, it was also possible to add an actor to the blockchain network, without the reset and restarting it. In this way, it is easy to imagine that all agri-food products are possible to track and trace. The problem is the impact of the network workload. It will have to be analyzed for each specific agri-food supply chain or a specific product.