Qualitative Evaluation of a Proposed Federated Object Naming Service Architecture

The Electronic Product Code (EPC) network is a collection of industrial standards designed to build an Internet of physical objects. The Object Naming Service (ONS), a directory based on the Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the important components of the EPC network. Given an object carrying an RFID tag (compatible to EPC global standards), and based on its EPC, the ONS allows storing and looking up service information associated with that object from the Internet. This facility could profit both business as well as ordinary users. But the issue is that at present there is a single ONS root zone (" onsepc.com"), and the ONS namespace is completely controlled by a single organization. Such a solitary control over the ONS root has raised concerns among businesses and political communities who worry that the organization controlling the ONS namespace could block businesses from certain countries or involve in industrial espionage. They have expressed the need for a Federated ONS (F-ONS) architecture. In this article, we present our proposed F-ONS architecture with multiple ONS peer roots. This architecture is functionally evaluated in an experimental platform developed and implemented by AFNIC (the ".fr" Internet Registry). The objective of this platform is to design, develop and evaluate technical solutions for managing the ONS in a completely decentralized fashion (federated model). The tests run demonstrates Co-operation between multiple ONS peer roots to access the servers containing the appropriate information. The experiments done on this platform have enabled us to provide feedback to the ONS standardization committee which is in the process of revising the current ONS standard to include F-ONS capabilities. Finally we discuss how it is possible to use the implemented F-ONS platform for object identification systems other than EPC.