Abstract—A cost-effective and easy way of introducing aproduct traceability system is to start from a small systemand gradually extend it to a large-scale system. Traceabilitysystems used in previous field tests are unsuitable for largescaledeployment because they use a single, centralizeddatabase. This paper describes an extendable traceabilitysystem proposed by Toshiba that employs distributeddatabases. Our proposed system called LoTR consists of twocomponents, a DHT-based ID-DB resolution mechanism andTraceBack method. The ID-DB resolution mechanism is usedto acquire a DB location from an ID. We apply the DHT toaccomplish required scalability. We have developed a DHTDNSmounter to achieve seamless access to DHT-based IDDBresolution from ordinary DNS resolvers. In addition,the TraceBack method creates links to bind distributeddatabases. We have evaluated the operation of the systemwith a real field trial. As the next step, we shall analyze itsqualitative behavior through large-scale experiments.

Index Terms—RFID, Product Traceability, DHT, DNS, DistributedDBs

Cite: WAKAYAMA Shirou, DOI Yusuke, OZAKI Satoshi, and INOUE Atsushi, "Cost-effective Product Traceability System based on Widely Distributed Databases," Journal of Communications, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 45-52, 2007.