It would be interesting to consider whether SNMP is an appropriate management technique for these readers. But it still wouldn’t provide a proper event protocol for relaying actual read data — UDP traps could be dropped, but reliable queues could overflow. And there would probably be a need to push filtering rules out to the edges, so the reader could use a policy to coalesce multiple reads or drop unrelated products. Let’s see what these folks have to say…

Technology Review: RFID Relief

many smaller companies that own multiple brands of RFID readers—one at the warehouse doors, another in the product-label printers, and so forth—and use multiple systems for storing product information can’t afford custom software to link them all together. AirGate’s one-size-fits-all software, to be unveiled next spring, acts like a universal translator. It’s the first system that can take data from any RFID reader and present it intelligibly on a simple Web page or dump it into a database program