Design and Implementation of EPCglobal Tag Translator

The EPCglobal organization found a RFID information architecture named ‘EPC Network’ was based on EPC (Electronic Product code). The concept of EPC Network is ‘Internet of things’, every object was given a unique identification code stored at RFID tag, using mature internet architecture to reach “Internet of Physical Objects”. With EPC Network, we can connecting every object and create the vision of “Identify any object anywhere automatically”. lthough the standards of EPC Network have not been completed by EPCglobal organization, but the functions of core services were defined and having done several specifications and documents. This study of exploring EPC Network architecture planning in car bumper supply chain, and extend the researches by Zeng(2005)、Liu(2006). Three phases of this study： 1.Phase one：Collection the current RFID applications in automobile industry and use these applications as references to planning a EPC Network based of car bumper supply chain. 2.Phase two： Study the combination、materials flow、issues、RFID implementation point and RFID implementation values between OEM Market and After Market in car bumper supply chain. 3.Phase three：Drill into the RFID information architecture after RFID data capture equipments were implemented, such as information function、core components needed for each supply chain member、data structure、data transfer type、interoperation between members. Keyword：RFID、EPC Network、Supply Chain、Electronic Pedigree

Even invented and applied initially during the World War II, RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technologies [1] have attracted much attention recently. Precisely speaking, RFID technologies have been applied very widely in some proprietary or closed systems, for example, animal control [2], portal control (access badges), etc. in last decades. The main advantages of RFID application are, storing item data in an electronic way even for further update, data access by electromagnetic wave in a wireless manner, and allowing quick multiple accesses to RFID tags. Based on the diverse applications, different spectrum bands are allocated, for example, LF (125 134.2 kHz and 140 148.5 kHz) for animal control, HF (13.56MHz) for electronic ticket, and UHF (868 MHz-928 MHz) for logistics, etc. Most of the frequencies are located in the ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) bands [1]. However, RFID was emphasized again mainly because of the need of supply chain [3]. By proposing a standard for the format of electronic data used for goods items, of which EPC (Electronic Product Code) [4] is an example, the products can be registered at once when they are shipped out from the factories in one country, and be released when they are checked out at the counter of a supermarket in the other country in the world. These products might have been transferred through Customs of many countries and carried by different traffic means. When being through these check points, the related data stored in the tags are updated. This is called “product tracking” and is to be carried out in an “Internet of Thing (IOT)” [5]. This Chapter is to have a review on the technology theme – how to provide low-cost RFID Tags, when RFID technology is to be applied into the logistics area where the RFID tags are supposed to be not re-usable and to be as “zero-cost” as possible. Generally speaking, there are three major parts composing a RFID Tag’s total cost, namely, antenna, chip and assembly for them. The cost of antenna, in addition to the design phase, is mainly dependent on the manufacturing process. Therefore, manufacturing process should be focused if antenna’s cost, then the tag, is concerned. This is the theme of this Chapter. Not like the other antenna applications, for example, wireless LAN or mobile phone, in which antennas need to be compliant to the end products’ appearance by following the market trend. In the tag antenna industry, on the contrary, it does not need to design or modify the tag antenna often. The tag antenna just needs to electrically match the chip used in the beginning of design. It is not necessary for tag providers to prepare a wide product spectrum in the market. Again, not like the mobile phone industry, RFID tag’s players just

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a promising wireless object identifying technology which uses radio frequency waves to transmit data between an RFID reader and tags. The RFID systems have been effectively applied in different areas, like manufacturing, healthcare, supply chain, transportation and agriculture. Despite the vast deployment of the RFID technology in practice, the inherent RFID tag collision problem still persists as a serious concern and remains a challenge. The tag collision problem happens when some tags in reader?s vicinity try to transmit data to a reader simultaneously without priori coordination. The existing RFID Electronic Product Code (EPC) Class 1 Generation 2 (Gen 2) industrial standard family uses the Q algorithm as its anti-collision protocol to resolve the tag collision problem. As the Q algorithm relies on the concept of ALOHA protocols, the achievable maximum system efficiency is only around 34%.
 
 In this thesis, we propose two novel anti-collision protocols, namely Bayesian Estimation based Modified Dynamic Tree (BE-MDT) and Binary Splitting Modified Dynamic Tree (BS-MDT), which outperform all existing anti-collision protocols. Both protocols use two phases of operations, i.e., estimate the amount of tags in the system and identify all of them. In the first phase of BE-MDT, we propose a slotted ALOHA based Bayesian tags estimation method which can accumulate the prior knowledge in each slot to estimate the amount of tags in the system and decide the initial frame size to use in the second phase. In the second phase of BE-MDT, we introduce Modified Dynamic Tree (MDT) algorithm which takes the estimated frame size in the first phase as the initial frame and follow by a definite collision skip binary tree algorithm to identify the tags. In our second algorithm, which is BS-MDT, we follow a binary splitting-based tag estimation method in the first phase and use the MDT algorithm in the second phase with a technique to estimate the initial frame size to maximize the system efficiency for any range of tags.
 
 We also present the mathematical models for each algorithm to determine the system efficiency and time system efficiency. The mathematical models are validated through computer simulations. Numerical results confirm that the BE-MDT achieve the system efficiency of 45% and the time system efficiency is 78%, whereas the BS-MDT achieves the system efficiency of 46% and the time system efficiency of 80%.
 
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This paper designs and develops a traceable platform of aquatic foods supply chain based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Electronic Product Code (EPC) Internet of Things, and focuses on designing Object Name Service (ONS) and EPC Information Service (EPCIS) of this platform. Tracking, traceability, recall and monitoring of tilapia products in the food supply chain can be achieved with participation of consumers, enterprises and the government. This platform contains aquaculture management system, process management system, distribution management system, sales management system, and querying and monitoring system, and realizes all-the-way traceability of aquatic products from breeding, processing, distribution to sales.

Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has several limitations due to physical constraints in signal transmission and data processing in the supply chain. Therefore in order to access more information about the product, it is necessary to store that information externally. However, standard compliance RFID infrastructures are expensive. Many enterprises, large and small, are struggling to invest in this emerging technology and are left without RFID connectivity. Hence, some parts of the information link of the supply chain are broken. This chapter draws upon the experience of two large scale pilot projects using electronic product code (EPC) technology to illustrate the issues of connectivity in RFID implementation. The chapter then describes a new expanded supply chain infrastructure system that adopts a generalized RFID data containment capability that incorporates other mobile and more cost effective technologies.

As the lack in business process information, the EPC (Electronic Product Code) data in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) network miss its readability. Focus on the challenge this paper proposes a kind of method and technology for composing and decomposing business process information with EPC data in RFID network. By abstracting the transaction information with its EPC data and composing both into one record of EPC event reports its readability can be improved obviously. We also provide two algorithms for composing and decomposing EPC data that easy database programming and generate readable event reports. A prototypical system of an IoT (Internet of Things, IoT in short) for retail business company have been employed to support our ideal and technology.

This paper presents an automatic, smart, safe and battery-less network for environmental monitoring implemented by passive Internet of Things (IoT) sensing devices with an Ultra High-Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) interface. A mobile robot navigates into the environment enabling continuous and automatic communication with passive RFID sensor tags deployed at specified locations and their localization as well. These low-power sensors, identified through the tag Electronic Product Code (EPC), may provide temperature, humidity, lighting, or other data through the RFID standardized communication protocol. To enhance the system degree of automation, passive RFID tags implementing antenna self-tuning strategies are also exploited by the robot to identify obstacles in the environment by exploiting the same mobile RFID architecture used for environmental monitoring. Fine-grained positioning of passive RFID sensors is achieved with techniques based on the Synthetic Arrays principle. The paper presents a demonstrator illustrating the described system. It includes passive RFID sensor tags designed for indoor temperature monitoring, with a moving antenna featured to localize the sensor tags and detect self-tuning tags installed for the collision-avoidance system. The performance confirms the practicality of the proposed IoT system.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) which is a mature identification and tracking technology recently is picking up its momentum with the emergency of a highly hyped of Things (IOT). The ultimate goal of IOT is to let human and objects seamlessly talk to each other via the Internet. It finds great impacts on our lifestyles in various applications such as supply chain management, access control security, mobile health-care, etc. In response to this technology trend and market demands, a high level infrastructure called EPC (Electronic Product Code) network with Object Naming Service has been proposed that rides on the future IPv6 Internet. In order to enable the operation of EPC network, auxiliary mechanisms such as privacy and security protection, context-aware capabilities, middleware and interoperable data semantics are needed. In this paper we propose a prototype of wireless communication system incorporated with Internet capability, namely Internet RFID. In particular, this paper shows the preliminary design, implementation and testing of the Internet RFID prototype in a client-server environment. As an experiment, we implemented a typical RFID system with the additional feature of distance finding that can track and monitor access control, and at the same time a database located remotely in a Web Server is updated. Users can query the Web database server in real-time about the location of the client. The hardware module consists mainly of the construction of two micro-controller systems: one for the user card and the other one for the station transceiver controller. Recommendations are provided at the end of the paper for future development.

In this paper, the error performance of the tag-to-reader link of a passive UHF (Electronic Product Code - EPC - Generation 2) RFID system is examined. An error-correcting technique is introduced that is based on the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) bits transmitted by the tag with backscatter biphase-M (or FM0) modulation. The proposed technique uses a look-up table that allows the correction of single errors in the received EPC. Numerical results, using additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and flat Rayleigh fading channel models, show that a better performance is obtained, in the sense of either reducing the error rate or increasing the distance between tag and reader.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a emerging revolution technology that mankind has ever seen. IoT represents the future vision of computing and communication. IoT introduce the world of information and communication technology (ICT) for connectivity of anything at anytime from anywhere. Current Internet is considered as “Internet of People”, connecting the users of all over the world with various ways. IoT semantically means a network of interconnected things (Objects) with unique addressability and connected using a standard communication protocol technology. IoT can connect physical world to the virtual world. Data in IoT should be gathered by radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor network (WSN) or electronic product code (EPC), etc. Recently scientists, academies and industries have put efforts to find a way for standard communication between physical object and real world, but there are many challenges in this area. This paper will represent the future of ubiquitous computing and showing the specific definition for standard architecture. Also we introduced two models architecture (3layer and 5layer architecture) in IoT. We will discuss the several challenges in IoT which recently researcher and architecture trying to solve these challenges. Finally we will be showing the Database scenario in IoT.

Transportation is an essential aspect to a developing country bringing service to all the people even in the countryside. The purpose of this study is to automate port services in monitoring and supervising the increasing number of passengers, improve port services like tracing passenger, ship crew members and generating real time voyage reports. The target output of the study is to produce system features of having integrated modules for passenger ticketing, check-in/boarding, baggage billing, and tracking appropriate passenger accommodation. RFID was used in identifying and authenticating passenger tags supported by Electronic Product Code (EPC) Class 1 Gen2 standard. The hardware components were interfaced using computer program modules for monitoring passenger accommodation. The passenger ticketing was developed as a web-based application using PHP, MySQL, CodeIgniter with online booking. System testing was successfully conducted to validate the performance of the sensor and the UHF reader used for better analysis and interpretation of the desired features as designed. The report print-out generated in a form of manifest or list of passengers correspond to the embarkation and disembarkation process. The result of the experiment in a ship environment setup showed localization of using RFID technology suited to improve services at the port area.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been very actively developed as an identification technology in the last ten years. The uniqueness of RFID tag's electronic product code has made it to be used as an anti-counterfeiting feature for objects attached to it. However, currently the anti-counterfeiting properties of the tag themselves and methods to prevent counterfeiting of the tags have not been established. Here we propose a physical layer fingerprinting methodology that will improve the security of RFID tags.

The EPCglobal Network is a system which provides the information of items to suppliers, consumers, and customers by granting identification numbers on the goods based on the technologies of EPC(Electronic Product Code) and RFID(Radio Frequency Identification), and connecting the space to store those information by network. The EPCglobal architecture framework is also a service consolidating supply and process chain by using EPC for the common goal of business corporations. In the national level, it is necessary to define standard vocabularies for each location and logistics business process for RFID environment using the pre-constructed logistics information infrastructure. Therefore, we define the standard vocabularies and partially user vocabularies for international logistics on EPCglobal network architecture. Finally, we believe that our vocabularies contribute to describing the events fur the EPCglobal network architecture and actually providing usable platform via the XML implementation.

This article focuses on the value of standards and the industry's work to date on an ePedigree standard, track-and-trace and electronic product code (EPC)/radio frequency identification (RFID). Parallels are drawn between the development of the bar code standard in the 1970s by EPCglobal's parent company, GS1 US, and the activities seen today in the EPC/RFID marketplace. The article also touches on issues such as patient privacy, item identification, sensor technology. Last, the article identifies areas other than counterfeit that may benefit from the standards that are being developed today.

With recent advances in technologies such as radio-frequency identification and new standards such as the electronic product code, large-scale traceability is emerging as a key differentiator in a wide range of enterprise applications (e.g. counterfeit prevention, product recalls and pilferage reduction). Such traceability applications often need to access data collected by individual enterprises in a distributed environment. Traditional centralized approaches (e.g. data warehousing) are not feasible for these applications due to their unique characteristics such as large volume of data and sovereignty of the participants. In this paper, we describe an approach that enables applications to share traceability data across independent enterprises in a pure peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion. Data are stored in local repositories of participants and indexed in the network based on structured P2P overlays. In particular, we present a generic approach for efficiently indexing and locating individual objects in large, distributed traceable networks, most notably, in the emerging environment of the internet of things. The results from extensive experiments show that our approach scales well in both data volume and network size. A real-world returnable assets management system is also developed using the proposed techniques to demonstrate its feasibility.