Tracing moving objects in Internet-based RFID networks

With recent advances in technologies such as radiofrequency identification (RFID) and new standards such as the electronic product code (EPC), large-scale traceability is emerging as a key differentiator in a wide range of enterprise applications. Such traceability applications often need to access data collected by individual enterprises in a distributed environment. Centralized approaches are not feasible for these applications due to their characteristics such as large volume of data and sovereignty of the participants. Inspired by IBM's Theseos approach, we have developed novel techniques enabling applications to share traceability data across independent enterprises in a pure Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fashion. In this paper, we present a generic approach for efficiently indexing and locating individual objects in large, distributed traceable networks. In particular, data are stored in local repositories of participants and indexed in the network based on structured P2P overlays.