Abstract With the rapid development of the cold chain logistics industry, its high energy consumption and low operational efficiency have become increasingly prominent, seriously restricting the sustainable development of the industry. This study focuses on this and proposes a real-time monitoring system for cold chain logistics based on the Internet of Things. It combines the long short-term memory network (LSTM) and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to build an energy consumption management strategy. Through the distributed system architecture design, a variety of data transmission protocols are used to ensure real-time and stable data collection and transmission, and to achieve accurate monitoring of key environmental factors in the transportation and storage of cold chain logistics. The experiment was carried out in a simulated cold chain logistics scenario. The data set covers multiple types of sensor data and is compared with multiple baseline models. The results show that compared with the traditional cold chain logistics system, this system significantly improves energy efficiency, reduces energy consumption by about 20%, increases temperature and humidity control accuracy to 94% respectively, improves transportation efficiency, and shortens transportation time by 8.33%. At the same time, the combination of LSTM and PSO algorithms optimizes energy consumption prediction and equipment scheduling, and the equipment group collaborative optimization strategy enhances system stability. This study confirms that the real-time monitoring and energy consumption management strategy based on the Internet of Things can effectively improve the economic and environmental benefits of the cold chain logistics system.