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IoT-Enabled Shipping Container with Environmental Monitoring and

Location Tracking

Conference Paper · January 2020

DOI: 10.1109/CCNC46108.2020.9045495

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 Smart Container: Logistics Environmental
Monitoring and Location Tracking System
K. Salah, A. Alfalasi, M. Alfalasi, M. Alharmoudi, M. Alzaabi, A. Alzyeodi R. W. Ahmad
EECS Department CS Department
Khalifa University, UAE COMSATS University, Pakistan
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract— Internet of Things (IoTs) interconnects physical delivery arrives late or doesn’t arrive at all [3-5]. This could
devices and objects to offer services to enrich user’s experience. be solved via a tracking system that keeps track of the current
Recently, due to the tremendous hype in IoT, it is forecasted that whereabouts of the container at all times and sends this
by end of 2019 it will generate 19 trillion US dollars revenue. information to the user, so that they are able to readily find
Also, it is estimated that by 2020 up to 50 billion IoT devices will
information about the location of their shipment.
be deployed to offer new services. For instance, empowering
traditional transport system with IoT will provide greater Additionally, some transported items could be of a sensitive
visibility and traceability to control and monitor objects nature, and are not meant to be opened during their
remotely. In traditional transportation systems, containers transportation. Therefore, a system must exist to monitor the
carrying donated organs should be sealed carefully, kept below exterior of the case, to make sure that it is not opened and the
a certain temperature, and should be placed in a physical safe contents are not switched in the middle of its delivery. This
place to minimize chances of damaging owing to jerking and information should be sent regardless of the current
accidental falling. This paper presents a system that uses IoT, whereabouts of the container, which shows a need for the
Cloud computing, MQTT, and Docker containers for effective container to be connected to the internet at all points in its
and remote controlling and monitoring of containers. During a
transportation cycle.
container’s shipping, it continuously monitors temperature,
humidity, location, and luminosity, and analysis it on remote
cloud server to notify the stakeholders when a certain condition
or violation occurs. We have tested the system in real
environment and found that it correctly notifies stakeholders
when certain undesirable environmental condition or human
action occurs.

Keywords—Internet of Things (IoT), Supply Chain, Docker

Container, AWS, MQTT.

I. INTRODUCTION
In recent era, due to the convergence of technologies,
digital information reaches to the destination located over
large distance instantaneously with relative ease and
reliability. However, the same cannot be true while
considering physical objects due to speed and capacity
Figure 1: Cold Supply Chain
constraints of carriers. For instance, it requires ample time and
effort for cargo to be shipped between New York and Los
This research proposes a monitoring and tracking system
Angeles. Due to exponential increase in business
opportunities, in 2014, almost 128 million twenty-foot to keep customers updated about his purchased item by
containers were shipped to and from countries all over the providing information detailing the condition of the
world [1-2]. Usually these containers carries items that could environment that the item is being transported in, regardless
be damaged in number of ways during transport, such as due of the transportation method, until item is delivered. The
to high temperatures, humidity, exposure to sunlight or, more proposed solution is smart, cheap, and secured. The main
traditionally, through sudden jolts or shocks to fragile items. contributions of this research include:
Cold supply chain as shown in Fig. 1 is a temperature
controlled system, which is important for goods, such as  Developing an automated monitoring system that will
vaccines and perishables that must be transported within a measure the conditions of the environment inside the
certain temperature range [2]. According to a report published container and alert the user in case of certain violations or
in 2014, around “seven out of ten top pharmaceutical products events.
required temperature-controlled transportation” [2-3].  Employing a technological solution for transmitting
In contrast to cold supply chain system, factors such as telemetry data from the container to a Cloud-Based
humidity and jerking are also critical in addition to Server; where, it is analyzed and sent to the users.
temperature to move perishable fresh foods and products in  Developing an application for accessing or receiving
containers [4]. Additionally, items could also be damaged by information about the current status of the container and
luminosity or strong vibrations. Therefore, continuous its position from the cloud server.
container’s monitoring and notifying the customers about the
current condition of items improve the quality of services. This paper is organized in the following manner: Section
Moreover, there have been many cases where a person’s II covers some technologies that are essential in the

XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE

implementation of our proposed solution and related work. power consumption. The state-of-the-art projects in this
Section III states the system design, architecture, and domain of research has mainly focused on detecting
implementation details. Finally, Section IV concludes the unexpected container openings, monitoring transport
whole paper and outlines the future research. conditions, and identifying storage incompatibilities [8-9].
“Maersk Line has over the past years equipped more than
270,000 refrigerated containers or ‘reefers’ with Remote
II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK Container Management (RCM). This technology allows
This section discusses the contemporary customers to track in real time the exact position of a
technologies needed to implement the proposed solution. It container, its temperature, humidity, and potential off
also discusses state-of-the-art monitoring and tracking service” [11]. Similarly, French shipping giant CMA/CGM is
systems. known as the world’s third-largest container. According to
Elie Zeenny, “the technology would bring the shipping
A. Amazon Web Services
industry into a new era”. As a result, smart container will be
Amazon web services (AWS) are online, reliable,
able to track the location, temperature, vibration, and any
scalable, and inexpensive to use cloud computing resources.
burglary attempts” [12-14]. Also, the research on smart cities
These resources can be dynamically configured depending on
too has focused on the food items shipment while avoiding
the needs of the user. For instance, a user can host a windows
the risk of accidents [13]-[15]. However, considering
or Linux cloud server and can install the required programs
aforesaid projects, their deployment cost is very high,
or he can access a prebuilt image of the required software
containers are very large. In comparison, our system has
with the operating system [6]. The service provides what's
added new features in existing project to increase its
called "Elasticity", which means a user can scale up or down
efficiency. Moreover, the existing researchers has considered
the resources if the demand for more computing resources
containers which are very large and expensive in their
increase or decrease. In addition, it also provides the service
research. However, our project is a monitoring system that is
in a secure way which requires authentication of any access
fitted to a smaller container as well, which could be extended
to the resources. These services have proven reliability, as
to fit other containers of varying sizes. This means that our
they have been used by companies such as NetFlix, where
product has an edge in the market, due to its flexibility and
more than 35% of network traffic was provided by Amazon
cost.
[5-6].

B. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN,

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a IMPLEMENTATION, AND TESTING
type of protocol that is mainly used for machine to machine This section presents the system overview, design, and
communication in IoTs. It uses publish/subscribe model implementation details. The specification of the smart
instead of client-server model to avoid single point of failure container is to monitor the temperature, humidity, light
issue. By design, it is a lightweight protocol, developed for exposure and sudden, strong vibrations and shocks that the
resource constrained devices, bandwidth limited networks, container might be subjected to. It monitors the container’s
high latency, and unreliable network technologies [7]. The integrity, as it should not be opened before reaching its
inherit features of MQTT optimizes the network bandwidth destination. It also keeps track the current whereabouts of the
and assures that packet successfully routes to the destination. system using a GPS tracker. All of this information is sent to
an MQTT broker on a cloud-based remote server via MQTT,
This makes it one of the most suitable protocols for battery
where all the data is processed and stored. Then, the data is
limited devices such as the Arduino and microcontrollers. displayed for users through the use of a mobile application and
This protocol is data-agnostic which means it can transmit mobile notifications for subscribers of the MQTT service. The
data in any format [6],[7], [9]. system architecture is shown in Fig. 2. The Arduino Uno uses
C. Docker container the Fona’s 2G connection in order to establish a connection to
Docker container is a type of technology that is the Mosquitto MQTT Broker in the Amazon Cloud using the
open-source. It allows developers to easily create, deploy and MQTT protocol and publish the telemetry data to it. In the
run applications autonomously. It allows a developer to Cloud, the broker forwards the published data to the
subscribers. Since the database is in a separate Docker
package an application with libraries and all the dependencies
Container from the broker, a python-based MQTT agent
required to run it. It is similar to a Virtual Machine, but it does
called Paho is used to receive the published data by
not run a complete operating system, which saves resources subscribing to the topic. Then, it process the published data
[8]. The following figure illustrates the difference between and then insert it into the appropriate table in the MySQL
virtual machines and containers. database. The history of the data and the alerts issues are
D. Related Work stored in the database and can be accessed at any time via the
Smarting the container transportation adds value for mobile application. The database contains two tables; one
safety of goods. Due to the development of online shopping, stores the history of published sensor data, and the other stores
it is essential for the customer to have an idea about their all the alerts that were issues. All published data contain a
timestamp and the location of the container, for accountability
shipment details. The main goal for development of Smart
purpose.
containers is to achieve high level of efficiency and low
 Figure 2: System Architecture of Smart Container

an alert is published. Additionally, every 30 seconds, it will

E. Arduino Control Flow Chart
publish a batch of telemetry data, which it reads from all the
Fig. 3 presents the control flow within the Arduino
based on our algorithm. Fig. 3 shows the features or
requirements that the mobile application must adhere to. As
can be seen in Fig. 3, there are two cases upon which
information is published; In case a sensor detects an
abnormality, i.e. a reading that exceeds the specified range,

Figure 4: Main Features of Mobile Application

sensors, to the MQTT broker.

F. Implementation Details and System View
This section discusses the implementation details. It
also debates on the ingredients of final developed product.
The implementation methodology of the system is divided
into three phases. The first phase is related to the hardware
components of the system such as circuit design as shown in
Fig.5. The second phase is setting up the server in the
Amazon cloud and setting up the connection to the hardware.
The last part is concerned to the development of mobile
phone and testing it.
Fig. 5 illustrates the circuit diagram that is
implemented. The designed circuit is based on set of multiple
datasheets of the components. The proposed algorithim is
implemented in Arduino. The antennas are placed outside of
the container, so that the material does not affect the signal,
Figure 3: Flow Diagram of Smart Container
and the sensors are placed in the compartment in which
 Figure 5: Overview of Smart Container’s Circuit Diagram

commodities are placed. The boards used are placed in a

hidden and sealed compartment to avoid tempering.
In the second phase, the Amazon Cloud server was
setup with the appropriate containers using Docker
Containers. We have setup two containers; a docker container
on which the Mosquitto MQTT Broker was installed, and
another where the MySQL database was installed. In order to
communicate with each other, a python-based agent was
implemented in the database docker container which acts as
an MQTT client that receives the published data, processes it, Figure 7: Snapshot of the Code for Reading Sensory and GPS Data
and inserts it into the appropriate tables in the database.
The database was designed with two tables, one to
store all the records of the telemetry data sent periodically, the publisher. After setting up the server, the communication
and another table which stores the history of the alerts sent by become possible between the Smart Container hardware
components and the Cloud-based server. We used an MQTT
library provided by Adafruit (The developers of the FONA
808 GSM + GPS breakout board that we are using to track
the container as well as connect to the cellular network) to
connect to the server and publish the telemetry data. The
snippets (Fig. 6 ) show the implementation of the code using
the Arduino IDE. Particularly, Fig. 6 has shown the code to
read the data from the sensors and GPS module. On the other
hand, Fig. 7 has highlighted code used to connect to the
MQTT broker. Also, it has shown the code used to publish
the data periodically to the broker using the publish
command.
In Fig. 8, the smart container with closed mode is
presented and it encompasses temperature, humidity, and
security based sensors to ensure safety of items in containers
during shipping. The container is manufactured based on the
specifications as discussed above. The antennas are placed
outside of the container, so that the material does not affect
the signal, and the sensors are placed in the compartment in
which commodities are placed. The boards used are placed in
a hidden, sealed compartment, so as not to be tampered with.
Similarly, Fig. 9 has presented the opened view of smart
container for more detailed analysis. All the sensors are
visible in this figure. For initial testing, the container was
attached to laptop server via a serial USB cable. The
Figure 6: Snapshot of the Code for Connecting and Publishing data container sends data using attached antenna to the cloud
 open/close field shows that the container was not opened.
The data shown on the mobile application (e.g., location,
temperature, etc.) is being fetched from the database’s latest

Figure 8: Smart Container (Closed Case)

Figure 10: Logged Data at Cloud Server

Figure 9: Smart Container (Opened Case)

server where data is processed and analyzed to see if there is Figure 11: Data Shown on Smartphone Application
any abnormality in the environmental condition or not.
G. System Testing entries. Adaptively, changes in values occur as new data is
sent via MQTT to the broker, and from the broker to the
To ensure the proper functioning of the developed mobile application. If a user clicks on any of the tiles, a
system we performed in-field experimentations. During detailed time series graph will be shown presenting the
container’s mobility, the sensory data was recorded at cloud historical data of that tile criteria as shown in Fig. 12.
server for a set of parameters as shown in Fig. 10. As can be
seen, the system has recorded timestamped temperature,
humidity, luminosity, and GPS coordinates i.e., longitude and
latitude. In the figure, Openclose tab indicates whether during
shipping container was opened or not to ensure the security.
Usually, containers are transported by a third party; so, it is
important for the stakeholders to ensure privacy of their
goods. In the presented data in Fig. 10, “0” show that the
container was not opened; whereas, “1” means container was
opened at time “t” during its shipping.

On cloud, recorded data is processed and results are

shown on the stakeholder’s mobile application to intimate
him/her about current whereabouts his/her container. Fig. 11
highlights current position of container using a marker on its
mobility pattern. In addition, it presents the current
environmental condition in the logistic environment. In the
designed test, the temperature of the container was recorded
27.50 and 23.50 degree calicoes at 12.00 P.M and 11.41 A.M.
Alternatively, the humidity level in the logistic environment
was recorded 99.99 and 66.4 for the aforesaid times. The Figure 12: Wall Clock Based Humidity Sensory Data
 by denying the integrity of the alerts. Moreover, local storage
for overseas shipments where cellular coverage does not exist
could be added to the implementation. Finally, to reduce the
cost of the hardware, customized function-specific chips
could be used instead of the multi-purpose boards currently
used, which boast unused features.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This publication is supported by the Khalifa University of
Science and Technology under Award No. CIRA-2019-001.
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the transportation company cannot escape its responsibilities

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