Supporting RFID-based Item Tracking Applications in Oracle DBMS Using a Bitmap Datatype

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based item-level tracking holds the promise of revolutionizing supply-chain, retail store, and asset management applications. However, the high volume of data generated by item-level tracking poses challenges to the applications as well as to backend databases. This paper addresses the problem of efficiently modeling identifier collections occurring in RFID-based item-tracking applications and databases. Specifically, 1) a bitmap datatype is introduced to compactly represent a collection of identifiers, and 2) a set of bitmap access and manipulation routines is provided. The proposed bitmap datatype can model a collection of generic identifiers, including 64-bit, 96-bit, and 256-bit Electronic Product Codes™ (EPCs), and it can be used to represent both transient and persistent identifier collections. Persistent identifier collections can be stored in a table as a column of bitmap datatype. An efficient primary B+tree–based storage scheme is pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Ying Hu, Seema Sundara, Timothy Chorma, Jagannathan Srinivasan
• Keywords: Bitmap Datatype, Database, Identifier Collections, Persistent Identifier Collections, VLDB 2005