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Software Abstractions for the Development of Mobile RFID-enabled Applications

Representing RFID-tagged physical objects as mutable software objects.

RFID-enabled Library

The RFID-enabled library is a mobile RFID-enabled application and illustrates the kind of application we target. The application runs on a mobile device, such as a smartphone and shows the books that are in the vicinity of the user and allows certain operations to be performed on them. Users can attach a small review message to a book, rate a book or associate keywords with the book, etc. This data is all stored on the book directly, using RFID tag(s). The application lets the user also filter the books based on rating or comparison with a keyword profile describing the user's preferences. For example, the user could just swipe his smartphone over a shelf of books and discover which books on the shelf are must-read books!

Towards naturally expressing RFID applications

Developing such mobile RFID-enabled applications with traditional software abstractions is a daunting task given the extreme volatility of connections to RFID tags. Simple repositioning of the mobile (reader) device, interference, etc. cause such applications to be very prone to failures. Currently the programmer is left to deal with these issues manually.

We even go one step further, by representing RFID-tagged objects as full-blown software objects. State-of-the-art RFID applications merely use RFID tags as digital barcodes and remain oblivious to the enormous potential of RFID technology in ubiquitous computing scenarios. For example, they do not use the writable memory on RFID tags to store contextual information.

Using the abstractions we present further on this page, programming RFID applications becomes more natural as application logic can be directly expressed in terms of the presence or absence of software objects representing physical items. Building on the ambient oriented programming model of AmbientTalk we provide integrated support for fault-tolerant connections and asynchronous communication with RFID tags.

In short, we consider RFID tags as the bridge between the physical and digital world. They effectively store digital stand-ins for real world items.

Demo

The movies below show a small prototype showing discovery of books on a shelf and a user adding a comment to a book.

Requirements

Software Abstractions

RFID event loop
RFID tags as mutable proxy objects
Ambient References
Multiway References

Further Reading

  • Distributed Object-Oriented Programming with RFID Technology. Andoni Lombide Carreton, Kevin Pinte, Wolfgang De Meuter. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6115, Eliassen F, Kapitza R (eds.), 2010; 56–69. [download1)].
1)
The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
research/rfid.1280242522.txt.gz · Last modified: 2010/07/27 16:57 (external edit)