Enabling Scalable RFID Traceability Networks

The ability to track individual objects is essential to many aspects of our modern life such as product recalls and anti-counterfeiting. As a non-line-of-sight technology, radio-frequency identification (RFID) provides an effective way to record movements of objects and has recently emerged as an enabling technology for traceability applications. Unfortunately, realizing RFID traceability networks in large-scale, distributed environments brings many fundamental research and development issues. In particular, applications will generate an unprecedented amount of transactions and data that requires novel approaches not only in RFID data processing and management, but infrastructure and architecture design. In this paper, we describe our approach for realizing a scalable RFID traceability network, which can efficiently and effectively support traceability applications. With a novel data model, traceability applications can share data across independent organizations in a peer-to-peer fashion.