On the Design of a Load Balancing Mechanism for ALE Middleware

Abstract

RFID middleware plays a very important role in the RFID applications, as whenever a large quantity of specifications need to be processed, or when the reader received a vast amount of data, the RFID middleware would be overloaded, and although traditional RFID middleware are usually duplicated completely among different machines and environment to balance the loads of the middleware, most of them do not conform with the characteristics of ALE. Hence, following the ALE characteristics, we propose our modularized middleware structure and partner it with our load balancing mechanism to achieve load balancing goal. Coupling these modules with the load balancing mechanism I designed, we would place each module at a node, and when a module node is overloaded, new nodes will be added to ease the load. On the other hand, when the load is of minimal, unneeded nodes can be shutdown.

In this paper, we propose a method to achieve load balancing in a distributed middleware that follows EPCglobal standard. The method according to predict the specifications for possible workload, and load status of each node to do the allocation of tasks and decide when to add and delete nodes to avoid inefficiency resources utilization.