A Graph Model Based Simulation Tool for Generating RFID Streaming Data

Abstract

Since raw RFID streaming data is continuous, voluminous, incomplete, temporal and spatial, RFID applications cannot directly make use of it. As a key component of RFID systems, an RFID middleware needs to clean, filter and transform the raw RFID streaming data. In order to know whether these functions work well or not, we need to test the middleware using raw RFID streaming data generated from RFID environments. A general RFID environment contains readers which are deployed at different locations and tagged objects which are transited between locations. However, it is a complex and costly process to construct such an environment to collect RFID streaming data. In this paper, we present a graph model to simulate RFID environments. In the graph model, nodes correspond to RFID readers and edges determine tags’ movements between nodes, virtual tags are automatically inputted and transited in the graph. We define several parameters for configuring the graph and generating raw RFID data. Raw RFID streaming data is automatically generated from the graph model when tags arrive in the nodes. Based on the graph model, we implement a simulation tool to generate raw RFID streaming data. The experimental results show that the generated RFID data streams can be used for testing the functions which are provided by RFID middleware.

This work was supported by the grant of the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (The Regional Core Research Program/Institute of Logistics Information Technology).