Mobile Agent based Load Balancing for RFID Middlewares

RFID middleware technology gains great attention recently due to its competitive business value. Due to the automatic identification and collection of information, RFID systems have been applied to various applications fields. Load balancing is a critical factor to provide a steady and fluent working environment for RFID middlewares. In this paper, we exploit the issues of load balancing for RFID middlewares, discuss load balancing policies which are compliant to RFID middlewares and propose a mobile agent based approach for RFID middleware for load balancing. A mobile agent, RFID load balancing agent (RLBA, for short) is proposed to gather global and local workload information for RFID middlewares and execute load balancing strategy. According to the load balancing policies, RLBA is composed of six components: load collector, load monitor, balancing trigger, middleware chooser, reader chooser, and reader reallocator. We also give the agent architecture and detailed design for RLBA. Mobile agent provides a decentralized and scalable approach for RFID middlewares to load balancing, which can enhance system availability and extensibility.