Warehouse of the future: goods tracking and tamper-proof recordings

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Use-case II-b proposal

Warehouse financing and good tracking depends on the quality of the bookkeeping, the resilience against tampering and potential for fraud. We will combine cheap Internet-of-Things technology to track goods moving in and out of a warehouse, together with Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) hardware protection against tampering, and combine it with tamper-proof recording on a blockchain.

Numerous solution exist for keeping track of warehouse goods. DHL has a manual passive setup using RFID tags. They use the following passive tags on goods to track them:

However, this system requires active gating of your warehouse. Each entry and exit point needs to be secured with Industrial-grade RFID Gates. This is known to cause problems with entire truck filled with too many RFID tags. Collisions occur when communicating with a truck-load of passive RFIDs.

An active tracking solution has the potential to scale beyond the simple RFID approach.
Simple Arduino boards can be used for prototyping, only costing a few Euro per piece. See on eBay.com what recent prices are.

The power consumption of this IoT hardware is key. With solid engineering effort the current record is 425 days of operational time, running on standard AA batteries. See full picture below. If it transmits every 2 minutes, it ran 26 hours on a small LIR2450 button cell. If it would transmit each hour, it would last for 17 days and on 2 AA batteries 425 days. See Github details with deep sleep mode exploitation.

• For the physical security we can use either the costly IntrinsicID solution or the Patent-free open ongoing TUDelft prototype

• Permissionless open blockchain to use would be the TrustChain. One of the very few solution designed for offline usage or frequently dropping wireless connectivity.