Dynamic Thread Management for Scalable RFID Middleware

An RFID middleware should filter and collect huge amount of tag's information gathered continuously by many RFID readers as the complexity of RFID environments increase. To do this, the middleware needs to control multiple adaptor threads which connect readers to the middleware and process the requests from readers. However, the use of multiple threads can deteriorate the performance of the middleware due to the overhead for excessive threads management. To build scalable RFID middleware regardless of the number of readers, the adaptor manager should decrease adaptor threads' overhead which can adversely affect middleware's performance. In this paper, we propose three dynamic thread management schemes to solve this problem: Group Merging, Group Splitting, and Adaptor Reallocation. To reduce the overhead of thread management, group merging and group splitting try to maintain the number of threads at an appropriate level. Adaptor reallocation reduces the overhead by exchanging adaptor threads between groups. Our experiments show that the proposed management scheme can improve the scalability of RFID middleware, compared with the single and the multiple thread managements.