Case Study

9. TELECOM - RFID Network Infrastructure

Customer
Our domestic customer is carving out a brand-new market in the RFID domain (RFID: Radio Frequency Identification) and has been a pioneer in RFID applications accumulating a rich experience base in the RFID domain. This company is a sponsor of the RFID integration network solution. This solution will distribute all the RFID equipments in Ethernet, which can connect to each other, all over the world. Once this solution is distributed, you can perform configuration management, operate and manage all the RFID equipment in any place through the Internet or Intranet.

Challenge
RFID was an entirely unknown technical domain to ArcherMind. The RFID integration network solution, needed a key piece of equipment developed which can collect data from a RFID reader and transfer them to higher level applications. This RFID Network Infrastructure component will be the backbone of RFID Ethernet and Middleware of RFID Application. Currently, most of the RFID companies provide the tag readers and today have not been involved in providing the network infrastructure. ArcherMind will have the sole responsibility to design and develop this RFID network infrastructure component.

Service Delivered
For designing this RFID Network Component, ArcherMind collected enormous amounts of information, then filtered and summarized it. In this phase, the most important gain is that we make clear that the New Component must comply with the EPC standards which are distributed by the RFID EPC global organization who aims to standardize the protocols in the RFID domain. In addition, it must also comply with the low-level reader protocol (abbr. LLRP) which is the important protocol interface between the tag reader and higher level data receiver.

After discussing and analyzing New Component specifications in detail, The B functional requirements became clear. It will need to collect all the tag data from different brand's readers, then filter them according to the specified filter rules and present all the after-filtered data to the upper customer application, such as ERP system, IBM websphere and SAP middlewares etc. The New Component provides standard Ethernet interface to access to the reader and application and in the future will need to provide WiFi interface.

Because of the independence on various brand readers and upper application software, we designed a reader platform which will provide the unified interface which can access the different readers through the corresponding adapter. In the same way, we provide a unified interface which can access to upper application through a corresponding reader adapter. The system infrastructure provides the convenience to access the new reader or upper application, just adding an adapter without modifying the Box system architecture. The system architecture saved development time and cost in future.

In the system, there has a core commander which is in charge of assigning the task to the corresponding module in system. Other main modules include configuration & management & operation module (abbr. C&M&O), application platform module, reader platform module, database module. The C&M&O module is in charge of system configuration, management and operation function. The application platform module is in charge of mutual communication with various applications. The reader platform is in charge of communication with different readers.

The system has been delivered to the customer who has provided us positive feedback on the new network component. ArcherMind is honored to have been part of such an innovative RFID Solution development.