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. 3

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. 4

Agent technology in RFID device management 5 Figure ： Architecture of Device Management

 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. 6 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 7 Agent technology in RFID device management (con.)

 How to achieve complex device management tasks.  Device Configuration Management  Device State Monitor  Dynamic Job Scheduling 8 Agent technology in RFID device management (con.)

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. 9

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. 10

 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. 11 Device Configuration Management (con.)

 Remote Configuration 12 Figure ： Device Configuration Procedure Device Configuration Management (con.)

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 13

Device State Monitor(con.) 14 Figure ： Monitor Process

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. 15

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. 16

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 Reader i, where i=1,2..N, and the device agent which is corresponding with Reader i is denoted as DeviceAgent i.  2)DeviceAgent i gathers statistical data according to the tag data read by Reader i, including the time each tag is read, the average time interval T i that two consecutive tags are read by Reader i. Then DeviceAgent i sends these data to DeviceAgent i+1 periodically. 17

Dynamic Job Scheduling(con.)  3)When DeviceAgent i+1 receives the information coming from DeviceAgent i, it compares with its own statistical data, then calculates the average time required for a tag to move from Reader i to Reader i+1, denotes it as TS i.  4)Schedule jobs for different readers according to the historical data, Set the frequency of read cycles of Reader i to T i, indicating that Reader i reads tags once every T i time. 18

Dynamic Job Scheduling(con.)  5)When Reader i reads a tag, DeviceAgent i sends a notification to DeviceAgent i immediately. Upon receiving the notification, DeviceAgent i+1 sets a timer according to TS i so that Reader i+1 starts a read cycle when time’s up.  6)Repeat step 2 to 5 until system exits. 19

Test and Analysis 20

Test and Analysis(con.) 21 Table ： Performance Comparison ： shows the test result of SimulateReader2

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. 22

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. 23