Hybrid threshold-based distributed discovery service for the EPCglobal network

In this paper, we present a new threshold-based discovery service for the EPCglobal network to be used by the Electronic Product Code-Border Gateway Protocol (EPC-BGP)- based discovery service. Our proposal employs hybrid threshold-based triggering and enables status updates in the routing tables based on either elapsed time or number of changes in the status of the EPC whereas the term threshold denotes the upper bound on the ratio of changes in the EPC status table of a supply chain. We evaluate our hybrid technique with respect to update blocking probability and define three types of blocking, namely the Justified Update Blocking (JUB), Unjustified Update Acceptance (UUA), and Unjustified Update Blocking (UUB). We investigate the impact of the frequency of update advertisements on the blocking probability. Through numerical results we show that the hybrid threshold-based update outperforms its counterparts in terms of all types of blocking probability. We further show that the proposed hybrid threshold-based update technique can control blocking probability under frequent product recall arrivals. Moreover, numerical results confirm that our proposal can adapt to traffic change and reduce the blocking probability significantly compared to its counterparts.