Combinational RFID-based localization using different algorithms and measurements

Every year researchers and engineers are finding new and useful applications for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems (Finkenzeller, 2003). Because of the growing use of RFID systems, many different areas of research have also been developed to improve the performance of such systems. A few of these areas of research include novel antenna designs (Rao et at., 2005; Calabrese & Marrocco, 2008; Amin et al. 2009), analysis on the backscatter properties of RFID tags (Yen et al., 2007; Feng et al., 2006), mutual coupling between RFID tags (Li et al., 2008; Owen et al., 2009) and the deployment of RFID systems to complex and extreme environments (Qing & Chen, 2007; Sanford, 2008). There are many aspects to each area of research in RFID. A major topic in many of these areas involves research on the antenna design for RFID tags. This chapter will focus on the design of efficient space-filling antennas for passive UHF RFID tags. First, an introduction to RFID systems is presented. This is done by describing the major components in a RFID system and how they communicate. Then, the particular backscattering properties of a passive tag are described from a unique electric field integral equation standpoint and from an overall systems perspective (i.e., using the Friis transmission equation). This discussion will then be followed by a section describing a practical design process of various space-filling antennas for passive tags. Finally, a summary of future work and a conclusion about the chapter is presented.

Two types of information, namely; related jobsite information along the process and feedback information have been found as essential elements for construction process improvement. In current practices, construction process has faced barriers in obtaining these two types of information. To overcome this problem, the new information system is proposed, namely; Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system which consists of RFID as an automatic identification and data collection device integrated with database. Precast concrete installation process in housing projects has been selected to be a case study. The research had been initiated by reviewing related literatures and conducting field observations. The results of these initial studies are utilized as a basis in constructing the conceptual model of RFID application in precast installation process. The conceptual model is then realized by exploring the RFID characteristics and developing the prototype of RFID system afterwards. The exploration of RFID characteristics aims to reveal the basic characteristics of RFID that are essential to be recognized in supporting the proposed conceptual model. The general findings show that the tag orientations, tag positions, distance, interrogation angle, and the presence of other tags affect the RFID performance. The vertically oriented tag performs more superiorly than the horizontal one. The reading rate, the maximum amount of detected tags at once, and the minimum spacing distance between tags tend to decrease as the reading distance increases. The coverage area tends to be smaller when the reader rotates either horizontally of vertically. The design and development of RFID system is a prototype. It aims to enable the involved parties to collect the required data and to access the required information. The RFID system involves pre-input, input, and output modules. The pre-input and input modules collect associated data to the details of concrete panel information, and the information of precast installation process respectively. The output module presents the required information of the precast concrete panel and the information of the installation events. The information of the installation events is presented in forms of table and graphical views to provide simple analysis of the current precast installation practice. The RFID system provides related jobsite information and feedback information which can be used to improve the installation process of the precast concrete panels.

Private companies and government have decided to provide Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems in places of free access to the population. However, as a result of such exposition, these systems become vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that can cause unavailability in the services. Furthermore, another complicating factor in that context regards the equipment or devices used on RFID systems, since they operate in frequency bands reserved for secondary communication systems, and consequently they have too few computational resources to deal with malicious electromagnetic interferences. Therefore, in this paper an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is proposed to identify the occurrence of the malicious behavior and to notify the system operator about one specific type of electromagnetic interference in RFID systems - the Jamming attack. The obtained results of the system show the jamming attacks are detected prior of having a significant impact on the communication between the RFID reader and the tag - i.e., the jamming attack was detected even with insufficient power to impact on communication.

Remote technologies are changing our way of life. The radio frequency identification (RFID) system is a new technology which uses the open air to transmit information. This information transmission needs to be protected to provide user safety and privacy. Business will look for a system that has fraud resilience to prevent the misuse of information to take dishonest advantage. The business and the user need to be assured that the transmitted information has no content which is capable of undertaking malicious activities. Public awareness of RFID security will help users and organizations to understand the need for security protection. Publishing a security guideline from the regulating body and monitoring implementation of that guideline in RFID systems will ensure that businesses and users are protected. This chapter explains the importance of security in a RFID system and will outline the protective measures. It also points out the research direction of RFID systems.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems consist of Electric Tags, or transponders and RF tag readers, or transceivers. Auto-tags of the RFID system have the unique ID feature and are capable of carrying information, which adds the tags more capability of which could be read only or read/write. RFID systems are now being used by more and more organizations connected with management, tracing, and control. The purpose of this study was to develop a information protection system (named PC-guard) using systems engineering and RFID technology. The login verification code can be notified in advance by using the PC-guard system because every PC user having their own Auto-tag will be checked with PC RFID reader. The information in the PC will be protected with RFID and the vibration sensor as the PC be turned on and be invaded. The development of this system using Blanchard and Fabrycky's procedure intends to bring the advantages of time saving and reduced risk using RFID technology. The developmental test and evaluation in the RFID lab had been done. The test results show that the PC-guard system can be operated well to protect the information in the PC with an active RFID tag and a PLC procedure with vibration sensor.

Ultra high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) systems suffer from issues that limit their widespread deployment and limit the number of applications where they can be used. These limitations are: lack of a well defined read zone, interference, and environment sensitivity. To overcome these limitations a novel receiver device is introduced into the system. The use of such device or devices mitigates the issues by enabling more "anchor points" in the system. Two such devices exist in industry and academia: the Astraion Sensatag and the Gen2 Listener. The drawbacks of the Sensatag is that it offers poor performance in capturing tag signals. The Gen2 Listener is based on the expensive software defined radio hardware. The purpose of the thesis was to develop a receiver that will enable several new RFID applications that are not available with current RFID systems. The receiver, named ARR (Augmented RFID Receiver), receives tag and reader signals, which are decoded by an FPGA and the results are reported through Ethernet. This device is central to the augmented RFID system. To show the suitability of such an approach, the performance of the implementation was compared to the other two outlined solutions. A comparison of the read rate and range of the implementations were the defining factors. The analysis showed that the ARR is capable of receiving tag signals with a read rate of 50% for passive and 66% for semi-passive tags at a one meter distance and is capable of receiving tag signals at a maximum of 3.25 meters for passive and 5.5 meters for semi- passive tags, with the reader being within 8 meters of the ARR. Two applications were implemented to showcase the ARR: an RFID portal and protocol analyzer.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has become widespread thanks to its important advantages over traditional identification technologies, like barcodes. Compared to this technology, RFID is, in fact, able to cover larger distance and does not require line-of-sight, that represent important improvements in the considered field of application. An RFID system is formed by a set of n tags, that represent clients in the identification process, and a tag reader, that is the identification server. Each tag is associated with an identifier (ID), that must be transmitted to the reader upon receipt of a suitable identification query. Tags can be active, i.e. provided with an independent power supply (like a battery), or passive. In the latter case, tags depend on energy provided by the tag reader through its queries (Want, 2006). For this reason, active tags can have some data processing ability, while passive tags are limited to doing only elementary operations and replying to the reader’s queries. An important issue in Radio Frequency Identification systems concerns the reading of colocated tags, that must be managed through suitable Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, specifically designed for low power devices. Efficiency of MAC protocols for RFID systems directly influences the time needed by the tag reader for completely identifying a set of co-located tags, so it has great impact on the whole system performance. A deep analysis of the MAC technologies adopted in RFID is the aim of this chapter. We denote by Ttot(n) the time needed by the tag reader for completely identifying a set of n tags. Under ideal conditions, it should be Ttot(n) = nTpkt, where Tpkt is the time needed to transmit one identification packet. However, in order to ensure collision-free transmission to each tag, a MAC protocol is needed that, inevitably, produces a time waste with respect to the ideal condition. The time actually needed for identification depends on several factors, like the technology adopted, the working frequency, etc. So, RFID systems can exhibit very different reading rates, typically ranging between 100 Tag/s and 1000 Tag/s. The most common MAC protocols used in RFID systems can be grouped into two classes: deterministic protocols and stochastic protocols. Deterministic protocols basically coincide with tree traversal algorithms: all RFID tags form a binary tree on the basis of their identifiers, and the reader explores the tree in a systematic way, by repeating queries based on bit masks. Randomness is only in the tree structure (due to the choice of the co-located tag set), while the algorithm execution is pre-determined. Stochastic MAC protocols are instead based on the framed slotted Aloha (FSA) algorithm, that requires each tag to make a constrained pseudo-random choice of an integer number in order to reduce the probability of collisions.

Recent advancements in wireless technology have resulted in an unprecedented demand for Radio Frequency (RF) spectral resources. Increasing frequency reuse also increases RF interference, which decreases a system's capacity and/or service quality. The primary focus of this research was the development of a test protocol for the characterisation of the performance of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems when active interference was present. The test protocol was comprised of four different experiments: Jamming on Central Frequency of Operation, Apply Full Range of Frequencies in Sweeps, Modulating the Jamming Signal and Tag Pollution. The effectiveness of the test protocol was verified by fully characterising eight RFID systems operating at frequencies that ranged from 120 kHz to 2.45 GHz. The performance measure of read rate was utilised to assess whether or not the jamming signal had an effect on the performance of the RFID systems. The results obtained through actual experimentation, as well as the validation by experts in the RFID field, indicate that the approach described in this research is viable and useful for both manufacturers and users of RFID technology.

In recent years, the research on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system has presented certain solutions that can meet the corresponding security requirements to some extents. However, the issues with multiple databases in RFID system, which are common in the real world, have gained little attention in the existing schemes. Although ONS (Object Name Service) solution is aimed at supporting multi-database in RFID system, it still has great security risk because of the lack of protection of the tag ID. In this paper, a new solution is presented which can provide sound protection of the tag ID and is adaptable to multiple databases, which can meet the security requirements of RFID system.

The characteristics of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems introduce growing security and privacy concerns. RFID systems need security protocols to provide confidentiality, user privacy, mutual authentication and etc. Many security protocols for the RFID system have been presented. This paper analyze several of the newest RFID security protocols which proposed by Niu et al., Fu et al. and Habibi et al. respectively form the security viewpoint of data desynchronization attack. These lightweight protocols were expected to proposed security protections for the RFID system and safeguard against almost all major attacks. However, we found that these RFID security protocols were vulnerable to the attack of data desynchronization. Based on strand spaces model, data desynchronization attacks on these protocols were analyzed and described. Furthermore, improvements to overcome the security vulnerabilities of two protocols presented by Niu et al. and Fu et al. were given. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i2.1993

Radio frequency identification (RFID) and Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) provide a wireless means to identify, locate, monitor, and track assets and people. RFID technology can be used for resource and patient location, to reduce costs, improve inventory accuracy, and improve patient safety. A number of pilot deployments of RFID and RTLS technology have yielded promising results, reduced costs, and improved patient care. However, there are three major issues facing RFID and RTLS systems, privacy, security, and location accuracy. As described in this chapter the privacy and security issues can be easily addressed by employing standard security measures. Location accuracy issues are physics-related and new advances continue to improve this accuracy. However, in hospital applications accuracy to the room level is sufficient.

Harmonic Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have attracted significant interest over the last decade as it provides many benefits over the conventional RFID systems. Harmonic RFID is desired over conventional RFID systems due to reduced self-jamming, location accuracy from dual frequency, and higher phase noise immunity. In a harmonic RFID system, the tag receives instructions from the reader at an RF carrier frequency and replies back at the harmonic of the RF frequency. A nonlinear element consuming very low power at the tag is required to generate the harmonic carrier for the battery-less system. In this review article, a detailed contrast between conventional and harmonic RFID systems is presented. This is followed by different circuit design techniques to generate harmonics and integration techniques to form a fully operable passive harmonic RFID tag. Also, a wide range of applications, especially sensor integration with harmonic RFID’s, along with the future trends are presented.

In this paper, we focus on configuring a low cost RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) system with less RFID readers and low density RFID tag textiles for stable and accurate self-localization for an omni-directional mobile robot. An RFID system using multiple RFID readers and high density RFID tags has already been applied to an indoor mobile robot self-localization. However, the system production cost is relatively high. To reduce the production cost of the system while maintaining the self-localization performance, we redesign two new RFID systems configured with 20 RFID readers and 5 RFID readers enlarging the size of an RFID reader antenna. Particularly, a new likelihood function of the tag detection with the redesigned large size RFID reader antenna is proposed for Monte Carlo Localization (MCL). Furthermore, we come up with a novel arrangement of RFID tags installed in a hexagon pattern. The new arrangement of ID tags enables both low cost ID tag installation and high performance of self-localization. We examine the performances of robot self-localization with less RFID readers and lower density RFID tags installed on the floor based on MCL(Monte Carlo localization). The simulation demonstrates the validity of our proposed configuration of the RFID based self-localization.

최근 RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) 기술이 다양한 분야에서 관심을 받고 사용됨으로써 RFID 리더 제조회사들은 다양한 종류의 리더를 생산하고 있다. 현재 RFID 기술에서 RFID 태그 데이터 전송 형태는 EPCglobal에서 제공하는 표준 규약을 따르고 있지만 각 리더 별 리더 연결 및 통신 방법은 회사별로 다른 실정이다. RFID 리더를 사용하던 중 타 회사나 리더 인터페이스가 다른 RFID 리더로 변경하거나 새롭게 추가해야 하는 경우에는 사용자가 직접 RFID 미들웨어 개발단계로 돌아가 미들웨어의 내부 요소를 변경해야 하는 상황이 발생한다. 본 논문에서는 RFID 기술을 사용 시, 특히 여러 회사 또는 표준화되지 않은 인터페이스를 제공하는 RFID 리더를 사용하는 경우에 RFID 애플리케이션과 독립적으로 리더를 관리할 수 있는 리더 프레임워크를 개발하고자 한다. 본 리더 프레임워크는 RFID 애플리케이션과 RFID 리더 사이에 존재하여 RFID 리더 투명성을 제공한다. 본 리더 프레임워크는 현재 작동되고 있는 리더를 모니터링 할 수 있고, 리더의 속성을 확인할 수 있으며 RFID 태그 이벤트 정보, 시스템 로그 정보를 확인할 수 있다. 본 리더 프레임워크를 통해 수십 대의 이기종의 RFID 리더 상태를 용이하게 관리할 수 있게되며 애플리케이션 상의 코드 수정 없이 리더의 추가, 삭제가 가능하게 된다. More recently, variety RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) readers are produced by RFID equipment manufactures. Although a transmission standard instituted by EPCglobal is proposed for data transmission between the RFID readers and tags, other RFID reader protocols and the communication connection methods are be in use in other RFID companies. To replace or add the RFID readers of an RFID system, the developers should make changes to the core of the application and/or middleware. In this paper, we propose an RFID reader framework which can manage RFID readers without having to make changes the code of the application in environment with the growing number of heterogeneous RFID readers.This framework that sits on the layer between the RFID readers and the applications provides transparency to the RFID readers. Additionally, it can be used for monitoring the state and the property of all connected RFID, and for recording the RFID tag event logs and system logs. By using this framework, heterogeneous readers can be replaced and added without writing additional code in the applications. Consequently the readers can be easily managed and controlled by the RFID system administrator.

The first topic in this chapter was an introduction to RFID systems. This was followed immediately with a discussion on metamaterials and LH-propagation. Expressions for the propagation constants, phase velocity and Bloch impedance were derived and discussed. Next, several metamaterial-based antenna designs for passive RFID tags were presented. The designs offered showed that by incorporating elements found in metamaterials in the design of the antenna on a RFID tag, the antenna could be made to resonate at a much smaller dimension. The result is a compact passive RFID tag with very useful max read range values.