Aussie firm hopes RFID floodgates will open

An Australian company is claiming it can speed up database processing times for RFID requests by up to 1000 times thanks to patent pending technology.

SensorConnect's FloodGate technology is currently lodged with the Patent Cooperation Treaty. The company hopes it will be approved within the next 18 months.

The company's director, Joe Ward, said the FloodGate event processing system can ingest and query more than 400,000 messages per second compared to 200-300 messages per second of existing database systems.

The first display of the technology has been with an RFID implementation in which the University of Arkansas, a key player in wireless technology, was asked to test and prove the veracity of the transaction results.

Ward said demonstrating the technology with RFID, which typically involves RFID 'events' from a number of parties that allows them to view the entire supply chain in real time, was a logical step.

"Trying to get multi-party collaboration across all the different suppliers is an issue in RFID deployments," he said. "They install databases and middleware in each different site and that cascades up to a central site where they try to synchronise that data from one company to another. All the copying and synchronising makes multi-party collaboration really difficult. Our technology is able to ingest huge amounts of info and query it at the same rate."

Because an RFID event is very tiny, and not much bandwidth is consumed, Ward said the company would offer its service as a hosting service where customers could point RFID readers to SensorConnect's backbone.

He said the partners would typically be telcos and data providers.