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High-performance radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a challenging issue for large-scale enterprises. As a key component of an RFID system, RFID middleware is an important factor to measure the performance of the system. To evaluate the feasibility of an RFID middleware, the performance of the RFID middleware should be carefully evaluated in various RFID-enabled business environments. However, the construction of an RFID testbed requires a lot of time, money, and human resources because it involves numerous tagged items and a large number of deployed readers. We must provide a meaningful input tag stream representing various business activities, rather than random data. This paper presents a novel simulation model for the virtual construction of RFID testbeds. To ensure the semantic validity of the input tag stream, the proposed RFID simulation network (RSN) extends Petri nets by including sets of functions that represent unique characteristics of RFID environments such as the uncertainty of communications and tag movement patterns. By configuring appropriate functions, the RSN automatically generates an input tag stream that matches the distribution of real data. We demonstrate that the RSN model correctly reflects data from real-world environments by comparing input tag streams from real RFID equipment and from the RSN model.
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