Agent-based Device
Management in RFID
Middleware
Author ：Zehao Liu, Fagui Liu, Kai Lin
Reporter ：郭瓊雯
Outline
Introduction
Agent technology in RFID device
management
 Device Configuration Management
 Device State Monitor
 Dynamic Job Scheduling
Conclusion and Future Work
2
Introduction
This paper proposes an agent-based
device management approach in RFID
middleware.
Authors design and implement two types
of agents : Control Agent and Device
Agent.
Through the collaboration of multiple
agents, authors achieve the function of
device management.
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Introduction(續)
A device management approach based
on agent technology :
 Providing a set of common operating
interface for RFID middleware.
 Supporting remote configuration and
grouping management of RFID devices.
 Monitoring the real-time state of devices.
 Dealing with unexpected events and carrying
out fault-tolerant processing.
 Schedule jobs for different devices
dynamically.
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Agent technology in RFID device management
Figure：Architecture of Device Management
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Agent technology in RFID device management(con.)
Control Agent
 It is the core component, which manages all
Device Agents and maintains their life cycles.
 It issues commands to the Device Agents,
receives and analyzes the reply messages,
and then makes decisions accordingly.
 It controls the devices and makes them
collaborate with each other to perform
complex tasks.
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Agent technology in RFID device management(con.)
Device Agent
 Each Device Agent is corresponding with a
physical device. It lies between the RFID
middleware and the physical device.
 Device Agent is composed of four
components:
•
•
•
•
Configuration module
Monitor module
Message module
Data management module
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Agent technology in RFID device management(con.)
How to achieve complex device
management tasks.
 Device Configuration Management
 Device State Monitor
 Dynamic Job Scheduling
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Device Configuration Management
Common Operating Interface
 It eliminates the heterogeneity of different
physical devices and provides a set of
common operating interface based on the
APIs provided by the major device
manufacturers.
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Device Configuration Management(con.)
Grouping Management
 It is carried out through the collaboration of
Control Agent and Device Agents. Control
Agent provides a service to store and query
the basic information of all Device Agents it
controls. Every Device Agent registers the
information of its associated physical device
to Control Agent.
 Control Agent maintains these information
and searches for the specific devices if
necessary.
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Device Configuration Management(con.)
Remote Configuration
 It is built on two bases.
• Common operating interface provided by Device
Agent
• Communication mode based on XML messages
between Device Agent and Control Agent.
 User simply send a configuration command
from the Control Agent to Device Agents to
configure the physical devices without any
manual interference with the remote hosts
and devices.
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Device Configuration Management(con.)
Remote Configuration
Figure：Device Configuration Procedure
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Device State Monitor
Each Device Agent monitors the running
state of its associated device, deals with
unexpected events, and collects related
statistical data that are useful for the
health of the device.
Device monitoring approach, author
adopt two modes:
 Subscription mode
 Synchronous query mode
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Device State Monitor(con.)
Figure：Monitor Process
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Dynamic Job Scheduling
In dynamic job scheduling mechanism,
multiple Device Agents collaborate with
each other, and the job of each reader
device can be scheduled dynamically and
separately, which greatly improves the
work efficiency and the system
performance.
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Dynamic Job Scheduling(con.)
 In most RFID application scenarios, a lot of
RFID readers are deployed in different areas,
such as the entrance and the exit in warehouse
applications, to monitor the running state of
these key areas.
 According to the predefined process, the items
attached by tags pass every reader one by one,
so the amount of tags read in unit time and the
time a tag is read are different for the readers
deployed in different areas.
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Dynamic Job Scheduling(con.)
Dynamic job scheduling mechanism is
described as follows:
 1)Suppose that N RFID readers are deployed in an
application scenario, each reader is denoted as
Readeri, where i=1,2..N, and the device agent which
is corresponding with Readeri is denoted as
DeviceAgenti.
 2)DeviceAgenti gathers statistical data according to
the tag data read by Readeri, including the time
each tag is read, the average time interval Ti that
two consecutive tags are read by Readeri. Then
DeviceAgenti sends these data to DeviceAgenti+1
periodically.
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Dynamic Job Scheduling(con.)
 3)When DeviceAgenti+1 receives the information
coming from DeviceAgenti, it compares with its own
statistical data, then calculates the average time
required for a tag to move from Readeri to Readeri+1,
denotes it as TSi.
 4)Schedule jobs for different readers according to
the historical data, Set the frequency of read cycles
of Readeri to Ti, indicating that Readeri reads tags
once every Ti time.
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Dynamic Job Scheduling(con.)
 5)When Readeri reads a tag, DeviceAgenti sends a
notification to DeviceAgenti immediately. Upon
receiving the notification, DeviceAgenti+1 sets a
timer according to TSi so that Readeri+1 starts a read
cycle when time’s up.
 6)Repeat step 2 to 5 until system exits.
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Test and Analysis
20
Test and Analysis(con.)
Table：Performance Comparison：shows the test result of SimulateReader2
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Conclusion and Future Work
This paper proposes an approach for
RFID device management based on
agent technology according to the
characteristics of agents and the
requirements for device management in
RFID middleware.
Control Agent and Device Agent are
designed to achieve device management
tasks.
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Conclusion and Future Work(con.)
 But the application scope of the dynamic job
scheduling mechanism proposed in this paper is
relatively narrow.
 Author will study the dynamic job scheduling
mechanism in depth and improve the algorithm
so that it can be applied in more complex
application scenarios.
 Author can extend more functions on the basis
of Device Agents, such as implementing load
balancing in complex reader networks by
coordinating multiple Device Agents.
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