Posted: June 5th, 2015

Applications of wireless sensor technologies in food industry: State of the art and trends

Due to advancement in technologies and reduction in size, sensors are becoming involved in almost every field of life. Food industry is one of such domains where sensors and their networks are successfully used to get numerous benefits.
Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as one of the most promising technologies for the future .However, a variety of challenges should be addressed to facilitate the widespread deployment of WSN technology in related domains. This paper should give an overview of wireless sensor networks and their applications in food industry including the challenges that should be addressed in order to push the technology further. Paper should be different from existing surveys in that we should focus on recent developments in wireless sensor network technologies and applications in food industry. Paper should review the leading research projects, technologies, and platforms. Moreover, paper should highlight a recent phenomenon in WSN research that is to explore synergy between sensor networks and other technologies and explain how this can help sensor networks achieve their full potential in food industry.

WSN simply goes to the tracing and monitoring of what is needed and possible – devices, things, living, plants, environment, etc.paper should highlight its use for the real time monitoring of the food supply chain , starting from the Cold Chain Monitoring (CCM) needs, such as shipments of Fruits & Vegetables,and Meat . There are a number of different terms related or used in conjunction with the WSN. These are ISM, RFID, GPS, CCM, DASH7 Alliance, ISO18000-7, ZigBee Alliance, IEEE 802.15.4, ZWave WPAN, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and many, many more.
As a special case, paper can take a look at current and expected use of WSNs is in Food Security.“Food security” refers to the ability of food systems to ensure that everyone has enough food to live a healthy life. To prevent food insecurity, we require reliable food systems at each stage of the food cycle: from food production and harvesting, during transport and distribution, at the shops we buy at and in the social settings wherever we consume food, and in the management of the resulting bio-waste outputs.WSN can be used to monitor and control the whole food cycle.In a separated section this issue should be addressed and discussed.

A special section should be assigned to application of WSN in food intelligent packaging.Technologies like wireless sensor networks (WSN) combined with RFID systems, biosensors and software elements can be used at the same time In intelligent packaging and smart/intelligent food supply chain that provide a centralized data flows in data bases. The RFID and SAW technologies can be embedded in a wireless sensor network (WSN), and the corresponding tags and readers can build more intelligent networks by sharing the sensing, logic, and transmission capabilities of the sensor networks. The application of these technologies on secondary packages, as the paperboard packages, can dilute the costs of application on primary packaging and allow the massive use of these technologies in the food supply chain.

Please pay attention to the following comments about paper content and structure:
1- Paper must follow the structure of a standard research paper. Please format the paper such that it consists of separated abstract, introduction, literature review,special sections, discussion and conclusion sections.
2- Introduction must have at least 4-5 references to support the statements. Please end the Introduction with one paragraph describing the structure of the paper, section by section.
3- I expect that most of the citations should be referred to papers which are published in recent years. Also, the references should be in MLA style.
4- The paper must provide table or tables for classifying, comparing and even prioritizing the discussed technologies for application in food industry.
5- Please give detailed information to adequately support the arguments. Describe important results and methods from recent literature articles and explain how those results shape our understanding of the topic.
6- Please improve quality of conclusion by giving more detail to paper findings.