Toward an SCA-OSGi based middleware for radio frequency identification applications

Abstract

The radio frequency identification (RFID) technology progressing is becoming a increasing interest in several application areas. To accommodate diverse and changing requirements from applications, RFID middleware should be reconfigurable. However, current RFID middleware is limited in its ability to support reconfiguration. To solve this problem, we adopt the service-oriented component-based approach in building the middleware. Component-based design enables decomposition of middleware functionality and is easier than the current one to manage and modify the structure of the middleware both statically and dynamically. Applying service-oriented architecture (SOA) can further reduce the coupling between components and external software and ease the integration between middleware and applications. We propose a two-layered service component architecture (SCA) open service gateway initiative (OSGi) component model so as to enable reconfigurability. Based on the proposed component model, we build a standard-based RFID middleware—SCA-OSGi based RFID middleware (SORM) which supports flexible deployment topologies and reconfigurability. The design and implementation details of SORM are illustrated.