Pipe-DEPCAS: A Middleware Solution for EPC-RFID Data Acquisition Systems

The huge growth of the RFID devices market, such as EPC (Electronic Product Code) elements in the most varied areas of the industry and the services, joined to the new advantages that every day are discovered on their intensive use, have provoked the immediate attention of multitude of HW, SW and custom solutions providers. The heterogeneous applications in which these devices can be used makes that the methods and develops for their management and control differ from the classical ones known till now. In this type of applications it is necessary to include some mechanism of acquisition and management of the radio frequency information. In this article a possible solution for this question is presented. It represents a middleware solution based on a pipeline and filter architecture that brings together the suitable proportion of flexibility, power of calculation, connectivity and simplicity of use to achieve suitable solutions for automation, management and control of goods and services. It has been developed in a more generic framework, that we call DEPCAS (Data EPC Acquisition System), and it is denoted as Pipe-DEPCAS. This specific solution contributes in this field with the best practices of design at the time that it assures an effective control of cost on having used standards of opened code and very known, simple and refined architectures. The paper describes DEPCAS and Pipe-DEPCAS new concepts and developments.