FlexRFID: A Security and Service Control Policy- Based Middleware for Context-Aware Pervasive Computing

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing targets the provision of seamless services and applications by providing an environment that involves a variety of devices having different capabilities. The design of applications in these environments needs to consider the heterogeneous devices, applications preferences, and rapidly changing contexts. RFID and WSN technologies are widely used in today’s ubiquitous computing. In Wireless Sensor Networks, sensor nodes sense the physical environment and send the sensed data to the sink by multi-hops. WSN are used in many applications such as military and environment monitoring. In Radio Frequency Identification, a unique ID is assigned to a RFID tag which is associated with a real world object. RFID applications cover many areas such as Supply Chain Management (SCM), healthcare, library management, automatic toll collection, etc. The integration of both technologies will bring many advantages in the future of ubiquitous computing, through the provision of real-world tracking and context information about the objects. This will increase considerably the automation of an information system. In order to process the large volume of data captured by sensors and RFID readers in real time, a middleware solution is needed. This middleware should be designed in a way to allow the aggregation, filtering and grouping of the data captured by the hardware devices before sending them to the backend applications. In this paper we demonstrate how our middleware solution called FlexRFID handles large amount of RFID and sensor scan data, and executes applications’ business rules in real time through its policy-based Business Rules layer. The FlexRFID middleware provides easy addition and removal of hardware devices that capture data, as well as uses the business rules of the applications to control all its services. We demonstrate how the middleware controls some defined healthcare scenarios, and deals with the access control security concern to sensitive healthcare data through the use of policies. We propose hereafter the design of FlexRFID middleware along with its evaluation results.