FlexRFID: A flexible middleware for RFID applications development

Abstract

Nowadays, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a popular automatic wireless identification technology, and provides promising benefits in a number of application areas such as supply chain management. Though RFID technology has attracted a significant attention due to the convergence of lower cost and increased hardware capabilities, there still exist major hurdles for the practical realization of its benefits. To achieve the maximum benefits of RFID technology, a dedicated middleware solution is required for managing and monitoring RFID readers or other types of sensing devices, as well as processing dynamically generated high volumes of noisy RFID data. Apart from these, such middleware should possess useful contextual characteristics such as implicit semantics, and support rapid RFID based application development. FlexRFID as reported in this paper is a simple and smart RFID middleware which satisfies the requirements mentioned earlier. The paper shows that FlexRFID is a highly scalable and easily deployable middleware in the heterogeneous sites based on different standards and consisting of different hardware. Apart from these, FlexRFID incorporates the mechanisms for supervision, testing, and control of its components, plus handles the security and privacy issues that inhibit the adoption of RFID technology.