Complex data collection in large-scale RFID systems

Abstract

With the advance of RFID technology and pervasive computing, a growing number of RFID devices are deployed in the surrounding environment and form large-scale RFID systems. Many applications run on top of such a system, and perform diverse and possibly conflicting data collection tasks. Existing works about RFID data collection either focus on deducing events of interest from primitive data, or scheduling the activation of readers to mitigate various of interference. The former ones assume that the primitive data have been collected already, and the later ones assume that all the readers belong to a single application whose objective is to read all the tags once. It lacks an effective way to specify the constraints in the process of data collection for multiple applications, and coordinate the readers to meet such requirements. In this paper, we proposed a specification language and a reader coordination algorithm to solve this problem. Our language can be used to specify complex constraints in data collection tasks, based on attribute selection, set relations, and temporal relations. And then a permission based data collection approach is developed for the readers to meet these constraints in a distributed way. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches in terms of the execution time.