Cascadia: A System for Specifying, Detecting, and Managing RFID Events

Cascadia is a system that provides RFID-based pervasive computing applications with an infrastructure for specifying, extracting and managing meaningful high-level events from raw RFID data. Cascadia provides three important services. First, it allows application developers and even users to specify events using either a declarative query language or an intuitive visual language based on direct manipulation. Second, it provides an API that facilitates the development of applications which rely on RFID-based events. Third, it automatically detects the specified events, forwards them to registered applications and stores them for later use (e.g., for historical queries). We present the design and implementation of Cascadia along with an evaluation that includes both a user study and measurements on traces collected in a building-wide RFID deployment. To demonstrate how Cascadia facilitates application development, we built a simple digital diary application in the form of a calendar that populates itself with RFID-based events. Cascadia copes with ambiguous RFID data and limitations in an RFID deployment by transforming RFID readings into probabilistic events. We show that this approach outperforms deterministic event detection techniques while avoiding the need to specify and train sophisticated models.