Complex event processing in EPC sensor network middleware for both RFID and wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In today``s pervasive computing, RFID and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology are widely used. RFID technology provides a unique identification of an object, and WSN senses the environment information surrounding it. But it is lack of infrastructure to support integration system of RFID and WSN. To meet this challenge, we propose EPC Sensor Network architecture which is based on EPCglobal architecture, a de facto standard of RFID. Our EPC Sensor Network architecture is a global architecture for collecting, filtering, and sharing both RFID and sensor events. The middleware in EPC Sensor Network architecture is an important component. The function of the middleware is collecting the RFID and sensor events from distributed RFID and sensor readers, filtering uninterested events, aggregating and grouping events, and providing web service to the upper layer and its clients. I introduce the complex event processing (CEP) into the middleware. CEP technology can detect the relationship between events such as causal, temporal, spatial relationship. By adopting CEP, the system becomes more intelligent and efficient. Later, we implement our middleware and show its usage in a warehouse example. In the evaluation experiment, our middleware can process RFID event in the speed of 31,205 events/sec, sensor event in the speed of 21,623 events/sec. The complex event processing speed is 909 events/sec when a complex event is generated from the 400 event pool size