Abstract— Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)technology has a lot of potential to improve visibility acrossthe supply chain and automate the business processes.This paper describes an EPCglobal-compliant embeddedarchitecture, called eEPC, aiming at providing RFID-basedsolutions for networked embedded systems. The designissues related to the EPCglobal architecture porting on theembedded systems field have been analyzed. These problemsconcern the role of the operating system adopted by theembedded system, the SW architecture implementation(Single-Thread or Multi-Thread) to satisfy the EPCglobalArchitecture constraints and the HS/SW partitioningalternatives. The proposed design alternatives explorationallows to evaluate which eEPC implementation, running ondifferent HW/SW platforms, better satisfies the multiple tagreadings and processing architectural constraints. Itseffectiveness has been evaluated on a real application whereproducts information is automatically put in relation touser’s medical data to retrieve information able to improvethe quality of life.

Index Terms—Networked Embedded Systems, RFID, EPC,EPCglobal, supply-chain.

Cite: F. Fummi and G. Perbellini, "eEPC: an EPCglobal-compliant Embedded Architecture for RFID-based solutions," Journal of Communications, vol. 2, no. 7, pp. 49-58, 2007.