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Get Smart with Your Cold Chain Monitoring: How Wireless Monitoring Ensures Food Safety

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Sensors and Gateways As we covered earlier, wireless sensors automatically collect the data you need to ensure proper temperature and/or humidity maintenance. To ensure accurate and ongoing monitoring, these wireless sensors can be configured to transmit data as often as required to meet your particular cold chain needs. Because they only transmit as needed, they're extremely power-conscious and can last for years on one set of standard AA batteries ensuring a minimal amount of maintenance on your part. With a combination of wireless sensors along with a LoRaWAN gateway and network, you can create an entire network to cover multiple cold chain locations. This network can be easily configured and monitored using a smartphone, tablet, or any other device that fits your needs. A LoRaWAN gateway receives data from, and sends data to, your wireless sensors. Once the gateway receives data from the sensors via LoRaWAN, it uses high-bandwidth networks (such as Wi-Fi or cellular) to transfer that sensor data over IP to the cloud. A single gateway can serve thousands of sensors and, by combining these wireless sensors with an associated gateway (and LoRaWAN network), you can create a low-cost, easy, automatic plug-n-play system. Install the batteries, plug in the cables, and your system is up and running. With this ease of use, restaurant managers, food service workers, compliance employees, and any other associated personnel do not need to be sensor or wireless experts. To receive your sensor's temperature and humidity readings in your application, you will need a central network service to manage your devices and securely route the data after it is received by the gateway. In the selection of the right network server, the following considerations play a role: Benefits of LoRaWAN Technology: Outperforms other technologies in harsh cold chain environments Signals penetrate well through thick walls Long range functionality Up to 10km (outdoor) Low power use Devices can last years on a single battery Low bandwidth Inexpensive (e.g. $75 for a temperature sensor) Secure 128-bit end-to-end encryption • Ease of integration – how elaborate and well defined are the server's APIs to connect with your application cloud of choice, for example Microsoft Azure or AWS? • Lock-in prevention – how easy is it to switch vendors after deploying the services? • Flexibility and scalability of deployments – do you manage your own infrastructure or rather go for a hosted service? Can you serve multiple regions and what are the availability requirements? • Pricing model – do you rather pay per connected gateway or per registered device? How does the model scale along with your own pricing model, beyond 10s or 100s of thousands of devices? • Security – what are your or your customer's security policies? Who are allowed to manage the security keys of your devices? • Service Level Agreements and support – do the service levels enable you to achieve the SLA's you have in place with your customers? Choosing the right network server provider is critical to your cold chain monitoring solution. For example, The Things Network is a free, well- documented service that provides the backbone for your LoRaWAN- based cold chain solution. They also offer an enterprise service tier for large and complex deployments with high availability requirements. They have an extensive track record in the cold chain monitoring domain.

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