Research And Development Of Name Service In EPC Network

With the fast development of RFID technology, Internet of Things and EPC network have been widely used in many industry fields. EPC (Electronic Product Code) Network is a kind of open network platform based on RFID and Internet and targets at product information storage and sharing across company boundaries. In EPC Network, Name Service is an essential component that enables interoperability across companies. Using Name Service, users can track and trace distributed product information in EPC network at item-level. However, there is no technology standard currently, and the current research of Name Service isn't mature and sufficient. In this paper, we analyze the domestic and foreign research status, and propose an efficient and flexible distributed Name Service architecture for large scale application in EPC network.In our research, the Name Service is composed of two sub-systems: Object Name Service and Discovery Service. The Object Name Service provides the initial entry for the tracking query, and the Discovery Service tracks and stores the product data at item-level in the supply chain. The Object Name Service is based on DNS, and introduces a kind of"Twice-Decoding"mechanism to enable multiple EPC encoding format and customized EPC encoding. The Discovery Service adopts distributed chain architecture, and each Discovery Service node on the chain is composed of several application nodes and storage nodes. Such design improves the fault tolerance and scalability of the system and allows system to process massive item-level data. Encrypted transport layer and item-level access control is provided to protect the sensitive enterprise data.The paper is organized as follows: firstly,we describe the research background, including related concepts of Internet of Things, EPC network and Name Service; then we analyze the research status of EPC network, and groups the domestic and foreign Name Service architectures into three types: the centralized Name Service, the distributed Name Service and the composite Name Service, and analyze their features, advantages and disadvantages; based on the requirement of EPC network applications, we propose and design a universal Name Service architecture which includes a DNS based Object Name Service and a distributed Discovery Service; finally, we introduce the detailed implementation solution of each component in this architecture, as well as the performance test and verification.