Modeling an Radio Frequency Identification Asset Management Solution Hosted on a Cloud Service and Its Characterization

A web-based architecture of an radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking solution is proposed and deployed. The architecture attempts to depart from the typical localized approach of most RFID middlewares. The middleware has been replaced by a web service residing in a cloud. The traditional roles of the middleware such as tag data filtering, sorting, storage, and event processing have been redistributed amongst an RFID reader-based application and the web service. This architecture provides more flexibility and control to large scale RFID-based supply chain operations which are global in nature and unsuitable to the traditional localized middleware-based architecture of RFID tracking solutions. The feasibility of the web-based architecture is further augmented by validating performance parameters such as tag processing and primitive and complex event processing delay. Different subarchitectures are also proposed based on performance data for different scales of operations.