The EPC middleware system based on cloud computing platform

Last year, Premier Wen Jiabao made it clear in the government's work report that "speeding up the development and application of the Internet of things" once again reflects the Government's high emphasis on the developments of Internet of things. With the promotion of national policy, telecom operators are actively involved in the Internet of things, and the internet of Things is an important profit point in the future.

1 IoT architecture and design features of existing EPC middleware

The Internet of Things is through radio frequency identification (RFID), infrared sensors, global positioning system, laser scanners and other information sensing equipment, according to the agreed agreement, to connect any items with the Internet, for information exchange and communication, to achieve intelligent identification, positioning, tracking, monitoring and management of a network. In the industry, the Union is generally recognized as divided into three levels, the bottom is to perceive and collect front-end data of the perceptual layer, the middle is the transmission and processing of data network layer, the top is the use of the analysis of the perceived data to provide users with a variety of application Services application layer. The architecture of the IoT system is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 IoT architecture

The perceptual layer is the foundation of the development and application of the Internet of things, which realizes the automatic collection and recognition of RFID tags mainly through RFID system. RFID tags are attached to traceable items for global circulation, the perceptron is connected to the information system, the electronic code in the tag (Electronic Product code,epc) is read and entered into the network information system.

The network layer of IoT will build on the existing mobile communication network and Internet, the core of this series of data management and processing is EPC middleware, which is an important part of the network layer of the IoT, which is to store, query, analyze, excavate, understand and make decision and behavior based on the perceptual data. , and provide various service bases for application layer.

Application layer is the object of the development of the Internet of things, software development, intelligent control technology will provide users with a variety of things networking applications, a variety of industries and home application development will promote the popularity of Internet of things, but also to the entire network of things to bring profits.

From the architecture of the IoT, based on existing resources, the core competitiveness of operators in the Internet of Things network layer this part, not only to play their own advantages, but also to avoid being confined to the role of the pipeline, operators should focus on the EPC middleware, become a network of things to the fabric of the service provider, the control of the core of the net layer, Occupy the value Highland of the network industry chain.

The design of EPC middleware for information interaction of IoT Enterprise combines the characteristics of traditional middleware, and realizes the technology of Java based on Corbar~rmi. Process object invocation, can realize the maximum degree of distributed software system: structure. In the later stage of middleware development, the form of SOA is WebService published on the Enterprise Service Bus, which facilitates the client's invocation. At the same time, the EJB technology in Java EE clearly regulates transaction operation and transaction management and has corresponding Java container to manage the transaction in middleware.

The EPC middleware can shield the difference between application layer and network protocol, provide a variety of communication mechanism for various specific applications, and provide the corresponding platform to meet the needs of different fields. Therefore, the middleware provides a relatively stable upper level service environment for the lower application. However, some of the principles that traditional middleware should follow are far from the reality, and most popular middleware services use APIs and protocols that are proprietary, making it difficult for users to interoperate with products built on different manufacturers. Some middleware services provide only partial platform implementations, limiting the porting of applications to heterogeneous systems. Application developers have a considerable risk of building their own applications on top of these middleware services, and often need to rewrite their applications as services are extended. Although middleware services improve the abstraction of distributed computing, application developers face a number of difficult design choices, such as the need for developers to determine the allocation of distribution applications to client and server. The presentation service is usually placed on the cfient side to facilitate the use of the display device, and the data service is stored in the server to close to the database, but not always in practical applications, and it is not easy to determine how other application functions are distributed.

To solve the above problems, this paper proposes an EPC middleware architecture based on cloud computing platform, in which operators can abstract computing and storage resources, integrate middleware services, and dynamically assign to users or applications that need to be used. When developing a business application, it is only necessary to invoke the required resources according to its application interface specification, which is in direct proportion to the total resource usage, rather than to the system throughput in the past. So users only care about business logic implementation, operators can deploy a variety of application services to the cloud platform to run and then through the Cloud Computing Platform Control Panel or interface to provide application services.

As a result, application services in the Internet of things can be pool by sharing the same huge cloud computing resources to meet the ultra-high computing or storage requests that users need in some situations, but only at the expense of their total resource usage. The dynamic expansion and contraction process of the above system does not require user intervention, the system will be automated, developers on their platform development, in addition to their specifications and follow the program is easy to be extended horizontally, and not the local application is not very different, which gives the system developers and users have a great deal of benefit, And operators can also firmly control the core of middleware services.

2 Improved EPC middleware architecture

The EPC middleware system is based on cloud computing platform, which is mainly composed of boundary node (Es) and internal nodes (is), among which the nodes are distributed in many places. This characteristic determines that the distributed system architecture of plant should be an inevitable choice, and the system structure based on cloud computing technology can give full play to the advantages of distributed computing. In this paper, an improved structure of EPC middleware system is presented, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Architecture of EPC middleware system based on cloud computing

In the boundary node, RFID Reader is used to accept RFID tag radio frequency signal, the information is initially processed, through the data transfer interface to the corresponding internal nodes.

The internal node consists of an event management system, a task management system, and an interface module. The event management system is mainly used to receive and process the information obtained from the boundary node and to filter the required data; The task management system is responsible for managing the tasks that are sent to the middleware by the superior middleware or enterprise application, which represents the user running on the EPC middleware side, Using the SOAP server to demonstrate the functions and interfaces of task management, it makes task Manager a SOAP service that can be accessed uniformly by all systems; The interface module is composed of interfaces for enterprise application, EPC Information Service (EPCIS) interface and Onsh service interface. It is the channel that the EPC middleware system interacts with the outside world, through the use of cloud computing technology, the interface module provides a stateful web Service to the outside, masks the differences between subsystems in the system, unifies the communication mode between the EPC middleware and the external environment, and adopts the SOA design idea in the module subsystem. To make the whole module flexible and easy to expand, when the business logic of the external environment changes, as long as the Web service interface is unchanged, the EPC middleware will not need to be adjusted.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)