Extension of RFID Middleware Platform for Handling Active Sensor Tags

This paper discusses the problem of handling active RFID tags in the RFID middleware. Application Level Events specification provides standard APIs for the RFID middleware. The basic role of the specification is the filtering and collection for the RFID data. However, this does not cope with the active tags because active tags are battery-powered. Indiscreet requests to the active tags will exhaust the battery of the active sensor tags. Moreover, the specification does not support the asynchronous communication, such as alert, which is a unique feature of the active sensor tags. This paper proposes an extended RFID middleware platform to support handling of the active tags. To do this, we present new APIs for handling active tags based on Application Level Events 1.1 specification. Presented Notification API and ANSpec provide the way to get notification some from the active tags asynchronously. We also provide extended APIs which enables discreet query to the active tags for reducing repeat report. The implementation shows that the extended middleware platform generates alert messages for the active tags. The main contribution of this paper is to define an extended APIs and develop a middleware platform for handing active tags as well as supporting passive tags.