Secured distributed discovery services in the EPCglobal network

Abstract

The EPCglobal Network is a global network developed to ensure global interoperability between trading partners in supply chains. Its main goal consists of providing real-time and accurate traceability of items in the supply chains. One of the major building blocks of the EPCglobal Network is the Object Naming Service (ONS) which is a central lookup service used mainly to locate the EPC manager information sources of a given EPC. Discovery services refer to a suite of services enabling any user, subject to authentication, to retrieve all relevant data, subject to access control policies, related to a given EPC in the EPCglobal Network. Many promising DHT-based distributed and secure architectures have been proposed to make the ONS more scalable and more secure than the current ONS specifications. Some of them focused on improving a specific aspect of the existing ONS architecture while others suggested integrated solutions for various weaknesses of the current ONS system. In this paper, we present a DHT-based, scalable and secure architecture for data lookup in the EPCglobal Network. The proposed architecture aims at replacing the current ONS system with a secure distributed Discovery Services system.