Section 9.1. System Architecture

9.1. System Architecture

As a part of the design activity, you must determine the logical architecture of the system. You can use the logical architecture of an RFID system shown in Figure 9-1 (derived from Figure 1-4 in Chapter 1, "Technology Overview") as a starting point.

Figure 9-1. A logical architecture of an RFID system.

You can customize this generalized architecture based on application requirements. For example, Figure 9-2 provides one possible customization for a slap-and-ship type application.

Figure 9-2. A logical architecture of a slap-and-ship type application.

Note a few things in Figure 9-2: The Edge Controller is assumed to be embedded into the network reader itself. The Raw Tag Database is assumed to be present in the reader itself in the form of some kind of read buffer feature. This database can also be hosted by the Middleware component itself. The Middleware can create the raw tag records in this database as soon as it receives a list of read tags from the associated reader (that is, before processing this data). In addition, the processed tag data is not shared with the corporate back-end applications. However, indirect sharing using the Processed Tag Database directly is a possibility. Such a scheme would probably use a batch process to extract the data from this database periodically. The extracted data can then be used in various manners to feed into the corporate back-end systems. This is not a recommended long-term solution, but can be used as a short-term one. The logical architecture of the system now can be used as a blueprint to determine which components are needed and how they need to be connected to implement the solution. For example, the physical architecture of the system can now be determined. Figure 9-3 shows a physical architecture that has been derived from the logical architecture shown in Figure 9-2. (Exact product details like vendor name, part number, and so on are not shown to maintain vendor agnosticism. But these details should be part of a physical architecture.)

Figure 9-3. A physical architecture of a slap-and-ship type application.

In general, you can determine all the components of a physical architecture only after thoroughly analyzing the RFID technical variables. The next section covers this topic.