Agent-based design of load balancing system for RFID middlewares

RFID middleware technology has been applied to various applications such as retail, health care, logistics, etc, due to its competitive business value. In order to get a stable and reliable working environment, load balancing should be considered for RFID middleivares. In the past several years, agent technology has played a central role in many application areas. Agent technology also provides a decentralized and adaptive approach for load balancing problem. Load balancing technology should consider five policies: information gathering policy, initiation policy, job transfer policy, selection policy, and location policy. In this paper, we propose an agent based load balancing approach for RFID middleware according to those policies and two agents are developed, LGA and RLBA. LGA is a mobile agent and compliant to the first policy, while RLBA is a stationary agent and compliant to the other four policies. We have successfully implemented this approach on JADE mobile agent platform which proves to be feasible and efficient compared with traditional approaches.