Design of RFID Cloud Services in a Low Bandwidth Network Environment

The use of Information and Communication Technologies has significantly improved the efficiency of modern supply chains. Existing IT architecture is too rigid to allow new technologies such as RFID technologies to be implemented. With the aid of virtualisation and integrated with cloud services, infrastructure hardware and network devices can be consolidated into a physical device, reducing the cost of ownership. However, for such cloud services model to work correctly, a high speed network is required between each site and the cloud service provider. This poses huge challenges for real‐time system such as RFID‐enabled supply chains. Since modern supply chains operate on a global platform, it is almost impossible to assure availability of high speed networks across the global supply chain. This paper proposes two solutions to supplement the virtualisation and cloud services model. A sub‐cloud services solution, where each service is distributed across multiple hosts across different countries and regions is proposed to enhance accessibility to higher bandwidth networks. The second solution is the Queued Burst Device Compression system incorporates a compression service that compresses RFID data sets into much smaller packages. This solution is proved to work by a multiple‐in‐single‐out queuing model and is suitable for low bandwidth networks such as GPRS and 3G wireless environmenst.