Research

Next thesis defences

"Heterogeneous RFID Framework design, analysis and evaluation"

Who? 

The thesis will be defended by Oscar Javier Botero Gomez, Phd in LOR department.

When?

Monday 14th of May, 2012 at 10.00 AM

Where?

Université Paris 6, Campus Eiffel, 8 rue du Capitaine SCOTT, Paris 15ème, room Noguez 26-00-101.

Board

• Pr. Sébastien Tixeul, Professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (board president) ;
• M. Alexis Oliverau, Researcher, CEA, Saclay (examiner) ;
• Pr. Tijani Chahed, Professor at Telecom SudParis (examiner) ;
• Dr. Nathalie Mitton, HDR, Researcher, INRIA (reporter) ;
• Dr. Yacine Ghamri Doudane, HDR, Associate professor, IEE Evry (reporter) ;
• Pr. Hakima Chaouchi, Professor at Telecom SudParis (thesis director).

Abstract

"The Internet of Things paradigm establishes interaction and communication with a huge amount of actors. The concept is not a new-from-scratch one; actually, it combines a vast number of technologies and protocols and surely adaptations of pre-existing elements to offer new services and applications. One of the key technologies of the Internet of Things is the Radio Frequency Identification just abbreviated RFID. This technology proposes a set of solutions that allow tracking and tracing persons, animals and practically any item wirelessly. Considering the Internet of Things concept, multiple technologies need to be linked in order to provide interactions that lead to the implementation of services and applications. The challenge is that these technologies are not necessarily compatible and designed to work with other technologies. Additionally, one technology may have different variants that add more complexity to the design. In a multi-device, multi-technology environment these imposed challenges need to be tackled in order to provide a unified information platform.

Within this context, the main objective of this thesis is to design a heterogeneous framework that will permit the interaction of diverse devices such as RFID, sensors and actuators in order to provide new applications and services. We pay especial attention to the integration of devices with non-RFID capabilities into this framework, allowing them to obtain the information provided by the tags using a network interface either wired or wireless. For this purpose in this work, our first contribution is the design and analysis of an integration architecture for heterogeneous devices defining in detail all its constitutive elements and message exchange interactions. We evaluated its performance by using simulations to verify its applicability and feasibility. In the second contribution, we propose an evaluation model for RFID topologies and an optimization tool that assists in the RFID network planning process. A Multi-objective fitness function and Genetic Algorithms were combined in a developed software application and a detailed description and tests are provided as well. Finally, in our last contribution, we implemented a simplified version of the framework by using embedded hardware and performance metrics are provided as well as the detailed configuration of the test platform."