A Distributed ePedigree Architecture

Current ePedigree creation and discovery services rely on a centralized framework, i.e., EPCglobal network. The centralized system has several restrictions to prevent it from being widely adopted. For example, it is unscalable when ePedigree service requests are increased dramatically due to the item-level product tracking; it has little privacy protection since the product historical information can be easily derived from the object name service (ONS) provided by the centralized EPCglobal network; it is cumbersome since the ePedigree information will be amplified in the local databases along with the product transportation stops; and so on. To overcome the above mentioned problems, we propose a distributed EPC information service (EPC-IS), which makes the ePedigree creation and discovery more robust, scaleable, and secure. Using our approach, the ePedigree historical records of a product is created and stored in the ePedigree creating parties' EPC-IS servers; in addition, each EPC-IS server maintains a look up table that stores the EPC-IS providers' one-hop up/down stream information. In this way, the ePedigree service creation and discovery are processed following a chain of processes with a distributed manner. The distributed ePedigree architecture and a set of EPC-IS service protocols are described in this paper