Oliot EPCIS: New EPC information service and challenges towards the Internet of Things

Abstract

Identification system[s], especially Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) system[s] played an important role in the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), and thus its popularity has increased in many industries at an unprecedented rate. GS1 EPCglobal has led the development of RFID standards from unique identifier, communication protocol to event repository. Recently, its scope starts to broaden with the new standard of EPC Information Service (EPCIS v1.1), while GS1 EPCglobal had focused on RFID middleware in the field of supply chain management (SCM). We believe that EPCIS can act as an event-based context repository for IoT. However, the challenges of scalability and flexibility should be taken into consideration against a large amount of heterogeneous data from a variety of sources. In this paper, we propose the novel open source platform complying with the EPCIS v1.1 specification called Oliot EPCIS, which can collect and share event data for a broad range of IoT applications. The main contribution of the paper is as follows. To resolve the challenges, we propose the scalable and flexible EPCIS architecture, the document-based model of EPCIS event and the new event called SensorEvent. We show that Oliot EPCIS generally outperforms two existing solutions through the comparative experiment. Also, with the healthcare case study, we show that Oliot EPCIS can capture and share sensor values requiring a very intensive data rate based on SensorEvent.