Patent ID: 7835954

Claim:
A system comprising: a RFID (radio frequency identification) edge server to associate with multiple RFID readers over two or more socket connections, the RFID edge server including an application server that filters communications from the RFID readers and boxcars event reports to a central server; wherein the boxcaring of event reports comprises combining multiple application-level event (ALE) reports into a single boxcar message that is transmitted from the RFID edge server to the central server, wherein each of the multiple ALE reports included in the boxcar message contains a set of information that defines a high level event used by applications on the application server, said set of information having been filtered from the raw stream of data collected by the RFID readers, wherein the ALE reports are collected by an ALE processing engine on the RFID edge server, wherein the ALE processing engine allows said applications to obtain the ALE reports without interacting directly with the RFID readers; and wherein the RFID edge server further includes a socket muxer that services the two or more socket connections, wherein the applications on the application server register with the socket muxer and issue asynchronous read requests to the socket muxer, and wherein the socket muxer performs network input/output (I/O) operations in the background by loading data directly into a buffer and wherein once the read operation is completed, the socket muxer notifies the applications via a completion callback; and wherein the central server unboxcars the multiple ALE reports from the single boxcar message.