RFID: From Concepts to Concrete Implementation

Abstract — Technologies of identification by radio frequencies (RFID) and their standardization with the Electronic Product Code (EPC) architecture experience a fast development. After briefly introducing the common terminology of the RFID field and a short presentation of its current standards, this paper presents one possible application domain: the tracking of objects. In this context, the distributed software architecture of a J2EE based assets tracking application, called RFIDLocator, is further described. RFIDLocator allows to trace electronically labeled objects within a predefined area (e.g. a building, a campus, a site,...). Indeed, when tagged objects are moved, the monitoring information system is automatically informed thanks to readers deployed in their environment. As the number of assets can increase dramatically, this kind of application has high requirements for scalability and reliability which are supported through the use of solid object oriented software systems (Enterprise Java Beans technology along with an implementation of the Event Manager standard). Some critical remarks about this emerging technology, the important questions it raises and the barriers it has to overcome to be fully accepted conclude this paper. I