Where in the World is My Suitcase? Air Passenger Luggage Tracking Using RFID Tags

In this paper we address the problem tracking in an end user-accessible, secure and efficient fashion the information about the location of objects, for example luggage items transported by airlines, over a geographically distributed area, using Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. We propose the use of both a centralized, commercial software approach based on the Electronic Product Code-based (EPC) standard, and of a distributed, open approach based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard. We provide an initial comparison between the two approaches in terms of architecture, openness versus commercial support, network load and overall performance.