Load-balancing mechanism for the RFID middleware applications over grid networking

RFID middleware often has to process enormous amounts of data, possibly causes overloading and leading to data errors. Therefore, RFID middleware applications require load-balancing mechanisms. This work proposes a grid-based load-balancing mechanism for RFID middleware applications. The proposed mechanism incorporates functional modules Buffer Management and Load Balancing Management over a grid networking platform, to buffer the read data and share the middleware loading, thereby solving the overloading issues in RFID applications. Performance analysis results show that the proposed mechanism is more efficient than the existing mechanisms. The mechanism has an average improvement of 29.15% for the processing time and improvement of 88.75% for the packet lost ratio, while the number of middleware hosts is fixed. The proposed RFID load-balancing mechanism is indicated to be very reliable. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.