Building Real-Time Physical Analytics with Edge RFID and MQTT

The article details a system architecture for tracking 15,000 attendees at a B2B exhibition using passive UHF RFID lanyards and edge computing. Antennas read chip IDs from up to 5 meters, with local Node.js daemons deduplicating data before publishing to an MQTT broker. The cloud layer uses time-series databases and WebSockets to deliver sub-second heatmaps and sponsor ROI dashboards.