eCloudRFID – A mobile software framework architecture for pervasive RFID-based applications

In the last few years, RFID technology has become a stimulating and rapidly expanding area of research and development. The technology's ability to precisely identify objects at low cost and without line of sight creates new and emerging opportunities for RFID applications that could become an integral part of our daily lives. Mobile RFID services for the Internet of Things can be created using RFID as an enabling technology in mobile devices. This pervasiveness enables embedded systems to interact with the user continuously, providing data from their sensors and responding to requests from the users too. Humans, devices and things are both the content providers and users of these mobile services. Mobile RFID services can be either provided on mobile devices applications as stand-alone services or combined with legacy and end-to-end systems. However, to develop and deploy this kind of system, it is necessary for an effective software development infrastructure to be able to deal with the restrictions and limitations imposed by related business areas, RFID and pervasive applications. This work presents a software framework architecture for mobile devices that aims to facilitate the development process of embedded RFID applications and the integration process of business applications and EPC Network instances. The framework provides for applications a common communication interface to abstract different devices and reading protocols as well as functions to process and distribute data.