Subject: RE: [Rfid] SLRRP and SNMP

From: "Howard Kapustein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:40:34 -0400

>But if the tags are not passing through the reader, then the reader is
not working ~ SNMP issue with an RFID twist?

If the reader reports no tags, is that because the reader's broken, the
tags are broken, or there really are no tags to read?

I'd expect 0 tag reads for a reader monitoring a dock door if nothing
goes thru the dock door.

>Is there not potential for some overlap here?

No.

Take a reader with a wire to the antenna and fry the antenna, where the
reader will power up but the antenna won't work. Some readers have no
built-in diagnostics and will blithely run, never reading anything from
that antenna.

Or even better, bake in diagnostics but now have a *partially* working
antenna, only working at, say, half the expected range/power/whatever.

SNMP is designed for such use cases.

The *consumers* of the data is very different.

Management vs. Operation data.

Management vs. Operation systems.

Tivoli cares about very different events and information than Warehouse
Management systems.

There's some overlap between "management" and "configuration" (where the
latter can be viewed as a subset of the former), but pragmatically you
can't divorce "configuration" from the operations side of the system.
[Well, you can, but it creates other headaches.]

The use cases and issues surrounding "management" and "operations" are
different, hence the reason SNMP may be a strong candidate for the
former (well, the SNMP protocol plus some MIBs), but a poor option for
the latter.

FYI there's enough of a delta here that EPCglobal has 2 workgroups,
Reader Protocol and Reader Management; RP 1.0's goal was "Reading,
Writing and Killing tags, and operations needed to support that" vs. RM
1.0's goal was (loosely stated) "managing readers".

That said, the RP+RM workgroups had a lot of overlap, and frequently
collaborated to varying degrees to jointly design solutions.

>One can look at other device classes and see device operations outside
of network operations captured by standard MIBs.

>Take the printer mib for example.  

Yes, very true.

But SNMP doesn't fit very well for operational behaviors
(reading/writing/killing), for a variety of reasons.

Certainly you -could- use SNMP to read tag info from a reader, but it's
not a good option.

Do *you* know of any application that uses SNMP to print a document on a
printer, instead of a "print" api/protocol? 

Here's a simpler way to think of your original question:

Change "RFID reader" + "SLRRP" to "web server" + "HTTP".

Can you please compare HTTP and SNMP in their intentions?

            - Howard

________________________________

From: Mountain, Highland M [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:18 PM
To: Howard Kapustein; Frederico, Gustavo; [email-masked]
Subject: RE: [Rfid] SLRRP and SNMP

Howard wrote>SNMP targets questions like "how do I know the reader is
working"

But if the tags are not passing through the reader, then the reader is
not working ~ SNMP issue with an RFID twist?  Is there not potential for
some overlap here?

Howard wrote>

SNMP = *management* of network 'things' (not merely one type of device) 

SLRRP = *operational* processing of rfid network readers

One can look at other device classes and see device operations outside
of network operations captured by standard MIBs.  Take the printer mib
for example.  

Thoughts?

Highland Mary Mountain

(480) 552-3817

________________________________

From: Howard Kapustein [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 6:26 AM
To: Frederico, Gustavo; [email-masked]
Subject: RE: [Rfid] SLRRP and SNMP

One delta:

SNMP = management

SLRRP = operations

SNMP = *management* of network 'things' (not merely one type of device) 

SLRRP = *operational* processing of rfid network readers

SLRRP targets questions like "how do I know what tags are passing by a
reader"

SNMP targets questions like "how do I know the reader is working"

Things like Tivoli/OpenView/... care about the latter.

Things like warehouse management systems care about the former.

            - Howard

________________________________

From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
On Behalf Of Frederico, Gustavo
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 8:28 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [Rfid] SLRRP and SNMP

Can anyone please compare SLRRP and SNMP in their intentions?

Thanks,

Gustavo Frederico

Allstream

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---

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 14:32:41 -0400

At 12:40 PM -0400 7/21/05, Howard Kapustein wrote:
>But if the tags are not passing through the reader, then the reader 
>is not working ~ SNMP issue with an RFID twist?
If the reader reports no tags, is that because the reader's broken, 
the tags are broken, or there really are no tags to read?

I actually think that there will be people who want to monitor a 
count of the tag reads performed by a reader, or on a particular 
antenna.

If there is a counter available for that purpose, it can also be used 
for threshhold alarms -- turn the reader icon red if it hasn't read 
any tags in the past 10 minutes, for example.

When combined with other sensors (electric eyes, sensors that detect 
when doors are open, motion sensors, etc.), it might also be possible 
to generate a more serious alarm if the reader should be reading 
tags, but isn't (i.e. when items are passing by and/or the door is 
open).

I would consider all of those items to fall under management or 
monitoring, and I think that SNMP is a better technology for that 
purpose than a proprietary protocol.

Margaret