RFIDMania extensible and adaptable RFID middleware and specifications

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification technology is an emerging technology that allows objects to be electronically tagged and identified wirelessly. In recent years, many organizations have started to show interest in porting this technology to their existing business processes. With the increase in popularity of the technology, many vendor-specific RFID readers are being manufactured and sold to interested organizations. Deployment of such RFID readers to existing business processes is difficult as software developers need to understand each vendor-specific RFID reader, due to lack of standardization among RFID readers. This paper describes a scalable and adaptable middleware, called RFIDMania, designed to allow software developers to interact with any RFID reader without having to know the specifics of the reader. RFIDMania provides a framework to process data received from RFID tags, and translate, decode, filter and route the data to the application in the form of an event. RFIDMania is able to offer software developers a framework to deliver portable generic code that is not tightly coupled with hardware specific commands.