## 7 Conclusions  
As it was shown, the applications of WSN and RFID are many and varied. The use of WST in agriculture and food industry provides new features that have the potential to be an economically viable replacement to wired networks. The value of technology can be best realized when integrated with agronomic knowledge, using the information gathered in the improvement of decision support systems. Also improving operations by providing early warning of equipment failure and a predictive maintenance tool, improving energy management, providing automatic record-keeping for regulatory compliance, eliminating personnel training costs or reducing insurance costs. The collaboration and synergy of sensing, processing, communication and actuation is the next step to exploit the potential of these technologies.  
From 2004 to 2008 the evolution of RFID technology has been developed very fast, adding new features to traditional automatic identification and data capture applications. However, a significant proportion of RFID deployments remain exploratory. Semi-passive tags can be used to monitor environmental variables, such as the temperature, to identify problem areas and to raise alarms. RFID loggers are good tools that are available in high quantities and are cost-effective. However, they require manual handling because of their low reading range.  
The main advantages of WSN for monitoring are its longer reading range than RFID, the flexibility and different network topologies that can be configured, the variety of sensors that are already implemented and their low power consumption. Battery life, reliability of measurements and performance in real environments are critical issues that must be improved.  
One problem might be that these monitoring systems create huge volumes of data that are difficult to manage, causing a huge increase in the daily volume of data in a corporate information technology system. This increase impacts the hardware cost required for implementing monitoring systems. Neither manual evaluation nor transmission over mobile networks is feasible due to limited bandwidth and expensive usage rates. The solution lies in implementing a decentralized data management system. Data must be pre-processed close to their point of origin by intelligent systems, which could be sited at the level of RFID, motes or the sink.  
There is a need to know the long-term behaviour of the systems. Most of the applications reported in this paper have short experimental periods (days or weeks). Longer testing and experimentation is necessary for validate some of applications presented.  
Another important benefit of the systems is the visibility that it can give along the food chain. Measurements obtained are consistent and provide valuable information on the conditions encountered during the life cycle of the products. It is possible to address, at regular time increments, what is happening with the product, whether it is temperature, humidity, acceleration, etc. Another advantage is providing effective support in legal situations as well as safety inspections.  
The integration of WSN and RFID seems to be a good idea, taking advantage of the complementary features of both technologies. For this purpose, some theoretical approaches have been presented, but a lot of work remains to be done.