Enhancing Traceability and Reliability in Cold Chain Logistics Through Hyperledger Fabric and IoT

Abstract

Cold chain logistics is a critical process for ensuring product safety and quality assurance; however, existing systems face significant challenges due to centralized data structures, limited transparency, and low reliability. The objective of this study is to develop a blockchain infrastructure based on Hyperledger Fabric, integrated with IoT technologies, to address these issues. In the proposed system, secure collaboration among producers, carrier, and retailer organizations is achieved through role-based access control and authorization mechanisms, while environmental data collected from IoT sensors are immutably recorded on the blockchain. Performance tests conducted with Hyperledger Caliper demonstrated that the system maintained stable operation even under high transaction loads. In particular, query transactions achieved the most efficient results, reaching 442 transactions per second at a send rate of 500 TPS and 818 transactions per second at a send rate of 1000 TPS, with corresponding average latencies of 0.21 and 0.26 s, respectively. The absence of failed transactions further reinforced the reliability of the system. In addition, scalability experiments were conducted to assess how the system performs as the network expands with additional peer nodes across organizations. The results confirmed that the proposed architecture maintains improved latency and throughput under both intra-organizational and network-wide scaling scenarios. The results demonstrate that the proposed system provides a reliable, transparent, and scalable infrastructure even under low hardware configurations, contributing to the rapid and trustworthy verification of product history and environmental conditions in cold chain applications.