Comparative study of RFID middlewares-defining the roadmap to SOA-based middlewares

Abstract

RFID technology finds immense applicability in various domains utilizing identification as the base operation such as in access control, localization, and tracking etc. It may be designed to work satisfactorily for either singular or a limited range of applications. However, the strict-coupling between applications and RFID equipment must be relaxed to scale up their usability. In order to achieve such a relaxation, RFID middlewares are employed that allow independence to applications from underlying complexities of RFID systems. In this paper, we present interplay of all that contemporary middlewares provide for RFID systems, and what are the actual expectations from one, in terms of desirable “features” and “aspects”. While the aspects are more business specific, features are implementation specific. Through literature survey, we extract implemented features of RFID middlewares which, are in turn, realizing design aspects. While breaking down these features into respective functions set, a) we unravel functional overlap between these features both horizontally and vertically, and b) we observe that each of these functions also implements part of system level business design aspects. Our analysis of these concludes that an appreciation of overlap both at the functional-level and at the design aspects-level allows necessary and simpler implementations of RFID middlewares. Further in this paper, we propose SOA-based strategy that helps to define and consolidate representative design aspects of a well-federated RFID middleware, such that these representative design aspects would serve as benchmarking basis for RFID middlewares. We have tested our benchmarking strategy to grade current implementations of SOA-based RFID middlewares. We found that none of these realizes complete business aspects of SOA.