Template based high performance ALE-TSOAP message communication for RFID networks

Abstract

Recently, the RFID technology has become essential for ubiquitous computing. As the deployment of mega SCM (Supply Chain Management) environments starts at the largest companies in the distribution industry, efforts tend to concentrate on a variety of performance improvements for the RFID middleware aiming to give quality of service for large RFID-data transmission. Web services, cornerstone of the RFID networks, require high performance, security and extensibility. Since SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) inherits the poor performance of XML, it is not easy for the RFID middleware to support high performance web services. The ALE (Application Level Event) communication interface from the RFID middleware sends a response message. Its serialization, which includes the conversion of common language runtime objects to the XML documents and streams packing of this data into a message buffer, has been proven as the bottleneck for SOAP``s poor performance. In this paper, we propose ALE-TSOAP, based on ALE templates, that provides an increase in the performance of the RFID middleware when generating response messages. We analyze SOAP messages to classify the various ALE template formats, design and implement our ALE templates and finally evaluate the performance of the ALE-TSOAP processing. The use of ALE-TSOAP does not change the SOAP protocol or the ALE communication interface of the RFID middleware. Through our experiments, we observed that our approach obtains up to a 327% performance gain by only using ALE templates for the serialization of SOAP message.