Distributed AgriFood Supply Chains

Abstract

In Agrifood scenarios, where farmers need to ensure that their produce is safely produced, transported, and stored, they rely on a network of IoT devices to monitor conditions such as temperature and humidity throughout the supply chain. However, managing this large-scale IoT environment poses significant challenges, including transparency, traceability, data tampering, and accountability. Blockchain is portrayed as a technology capable of solving the problems of transparency, traceability, data tampering, and accountability, which are key issues in the AgriFood supply chain. Nonetheless, there are challenges related to managing a large-scale IoT environment using the current security, authentication, and access control solutions. To address these issues, we introduce an architecture in which IoT devices record data and store them in the participant’s cloud after validation by endorsing peers following an attribute-based access control (ABAC) policy. This policy allows IoT device owners to specify the physical quantities, value ranges, time periods, and types of data that each device is permitted to measure and transmit. Authorized users can access this data under the ABAC policy contract. Our solution demonstrates efficiency, with 50% of IoT data write requests completed in less than 0.14 s using solo ordering service and 2.5 s with raft ordering service. Data retrieval shows an average latency between 0.34 and 0.57 s and a throughput ranging from 124.8 to 9.9 Transactions Per Second (TPS) for data sizes between 8 and 512 kilobytes. This architecture not only enhances the management of IoT environments in the AgriFood supply chain but also ensures data privacy and security.