NoSQL and real-time big data processing: An approach to enable EPCglobal based Internet of Things.

Abstract

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, RFID technology has attracted more and more interests from many industries. In the EPCglobal standard which standardizes RFID architectural framework and interfaces, the Electronic Product Code Information System (EPCIS) - the repository in the RFID network - plays a pivotal role in storing dynamic and historical RFID trajectory data, well-tailored to supply chain applications. However, in the IoT era, EPCIS should be capable of storing a large amount of real-time and continuous time-series RFID data in a scalable manner. This thesis analyzes the requirements and current design of EPCIS, reports current limitations of SQL-based approaches for IoT applications and proposes a NoSQL-based approach for EPCIS. In addition, the thesis studies on a real-time data processing framework, which is applied to EPCglobal network to turn IoT data into meaningful information in real-time. To evaluate this work, a Cassandra-based EPCIS has been developed, a performance comparison between MySQL and Cassandra in different deployment scenarios (i.e., physical and virtual machines) is conducted, and a prototype real-time data processing implementation is introduced in a given case study.