Towards traceability across sovereign, distributed RFID databases

Abstract

Tracking and tracing individual items is a new and emerging trend in many industries. Driven by maturing technologies such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) and upcoming standards such as the Electronic Product Code (EPC), a rapidly increasing number of enterprises are collecting vast amounts of tracking data. To enable traceability over the entire life-cycle of items data has to be shared across independent and possibly competing enterprises. The need to simultaneously compete and cooperate requires a traceability system design that allows companies to share their traceability data while maintaining complete sovereignty over what is shared and with whom. Based on an extensive study of traceability applications, we introduce the formal concept of traceability networks and highlight the technical challenges involved in sharing data in such a network. To address these challenges, we present an innovative combination of query processing techniques from P2P networks and distributed as well as parallel databases with confidentiality enforcement techniques. © 2006 IEEE.