Effective Aggregation and Querying of Probabilistic RFID Data in a Location Tracking Context

RFID applications usually rely on RFID deployments to manage high-level events such as tracking the location that products visit for supply-chain management, localizing intruders for alerting services, and so on. However, transforming low-level streams into high-level events poses a number of challenges. In this paper, we deal with the well known issues of data redundancy and data-information mismatch: we propose an on-line summarization mechanism that is able to provide small space representation for massive RFID probabilistic data streams while preserving the meaningfulness of the information. We also show that common information needs, i.e. detecting complex events meaningful to applications, can be effectively answered by executing temporal probabilistic SQL queries directly on the summarized data. All the techniques presented in this paper are implemented in a complete framework and successfully evaluated in real-world location tracking scenarios.