EPC information services with No-SQL datastore for the Internet of Things

Abstract

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, RFID technology has attracted more and more interests from many industries. In the EPCglobal standard which standardizes RFID architectural framework and interfaces, the Electronic Product Code Information System (EPCIS) - the repository in the RFID network - plays a pivotal role in storing dynamic and historical RFID trajectory data, well-tailored to supply chain applications. However, in the IoT era, EPCIS should be capable of storing a large amount of realtime and continuous time-series RFID data in a scalable manner. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the requirements and current design of EPCIS and report current limitations of SQL-based approaches for IoT applications. To cope with these limitations, we explore a NoSQL-based approach for EPCIS in the IoT and propose a column-family-based data model and customization for Cassandra-based EPCIS. Using real-world implementation, we also conduct a performance comparison between MySQL and Cassandra in different deployment scenarios (i.e., physical and virtual machines). As a result, we show the benefits of using Cassandra datastore for EPCIS in the IoT in terms of response time, throughput, and flexibility.