Research On Key Technologies Of RFID Application Oriented Context-aware Computing

With the rapid development of computing, communication and sensing technologies, the internet of things is on the way to become a reality. As a key technology of the internet of things, RFID attracts a lot of attentions. Focusing on RFID technology, its industrialization and promoting RFID's applications in logistics and supply chain, transportation, health care and other industries is the only way to construct a pervasive internet of things. However, the automation and intelligence of applications is limited and the potential of RFID technology has not been fully tapped. The underlying reasons of the problem being: (1) Lack of an effective model to describe different kinds of information in RFID application; (2) Existing probabilistic inference models for RFID data processing is limited in expression and inference accuracy; (3) Lack of a framework to transform low level RFID data to high level.Construction of context-aware RFID applications will play an active role in solving the above mentioned problems. RFID technology is used to sense context, track and trace objects. Context-aware computing combines objects with physical environment intelligently. It provides information collection, fusion and inference so that each object in the environment is capable of cognition. They can communicate with each other and take proper actions, which will minimize human interference and promote automation and intelligence in RFID applications.To realize RFID oriented context aware computing, we undertook the following research:(1) Define context information in RFID application, and analyse its characteristics. The model should be expressive, verifiable and extensible. After comparison of existing models, we conclude that object-oriented context model is more suitable for modeling context information in RFID application. We use the object-oriented approach to model context information in RFID applications for logistics and supply chain management.(2) Present the necessity of probabilistic inference in RFID application. After the analysis of the shortcomings of the existing object tracking and tracing probabilistic inference methods, we put forward a hidden semi-Markov model based probabilistic inference model for RFID applications. Experiments done have proved that the proposed model performs best compared to the others.(3) Describe the design principles of the context-aware framework for RFID applications. Then we propose a service-oriented component-based configurable and reconfigurable model, the development lifecycle for the model and a workload balance mechanism to fulfill the design principles. On the basis of the component model, we designed and developed a context-aware framework for RFID applications. Different from existing frameworks, it is for RFID applications, compatible with existing RFID frameworks, flexible, extensible, deploytime configurable and run-time reconfigurable.(4) We also designed and developed a context-aware application– intelligent retailing environment. Through the application, we discuss the characteristics of the framework, proving that introducing context-aware computing into RFID application will result in considerable benefits.