A test data generation tool for testing RFID middleware

This paper presents a noble RFID data generation tool to enable efficient and low cost testing of the RFID middleware. RFID systems have been widely used in many business areas such as supply-chain management and yard management. As a key component of RFID system, the RFID middleware should be carefully evaluated from various environments. However, taking a variety of tests for RFID middleware is very complex and costly process because it requires construction of test environments such as deploying RFID devices, tagging of product items, and so on. For instance, the stress testing of RFID middleware needs to deploy millions of tags which take lots of money, time and human recourses. To solve these problems, we design virtual readers and tags for constructing virtual environment instead of real devices. Using virtual devices, we implement a test data generation tool which generates tag stream data for testing the RFID middleware. To simulate real RFID environment, we first define several parameters for representing real environments. By configuring the parameters, this tool can generate test data set which emulates various business scenarios. We also define several measurement metrics which are related to four factors like group, redundancy, noisy as well as route to verify the correctness of the generated data set. The experimental results show that our testing tool is cable for facilitating RFID middleware test.