eEPC: an EPCglobal-compliant Embedded Architecture for RFID-based Solutions

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has a lot of potential to improve visibility across the supply chain and automate the business processes. This paper describes an EPCglobal compliant embedded architecture, called eEPC, aiming at providing RFID-based solutions for networked embedded systems. The design issues related to the EPCglobal architecture porting on the embedded systems field have been analyzed. These problems concern the role of the operating system adopted by the embedded system, the SW architecture implementation (Single-Thread or Multi-Thread) to satisfy the EPCglobal Architecture constraints and the HS/SW partitioning alternatives. The proposed design alternatives exploration allows to evaluate which eEPC implementation, running on different HW/SW platforms, better satisfies the multiple tag readings and processing architectural constraints. Its effectiveness has been evaluated on a real application where products information is automatically put in relation to user’s medical data to retrieve information able to improve the quality of life.