Dynamic Management of Adaptor Threads for Supporting Scalable RFID Middleware

Abstract

This paper presents a mechanism for providing reader scalability for RFID middleware. As the complexity of RFID environments increases, a middleware needs to support many RFID readers. The main purpose of the paper is to support multiple readers without decrease in the performance. To achieve this, we define Reader Framework for reader management, which consists of the adaptors and the adaptor manager. The adaptor manager needs many threads to process the requests from readers. Even the use of multiple threads is necessary for supporting multiple readers; it can deteriorate the performance of the middleware due to the overhead for excessive threads management. The basic Idea of this paper is to detect adaptor threads’ overhead which can adversely affect middleware’s performance and try to maintain the number of threads at an appropriate level. We propose two dynamic thread management mechanisms: Group Merging and Group Splitting. To reduce the overhead for thread management, group merging decrease the number of threads and group splitting increases the number of threads. An experiment shows that the proposed mechanism can improve the scalability of RFID middleware by reducing the overhead for thread management at runtime.