Abstract
Radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensors networks (WSNs) are two fundamental pillars that enable the Internet of Things (IoT). RFID systems are able to identify and track devices, whilst WSNs cooperate to gather and provide information from interconnected sensors. This involves challenges, for example, in transforming RFID systems with identification capabilities into sensing and computational platforms, as well as considering them as architectures of wirelessly connected sensing tags. This, together with the latest advances in WSNs and with the integration of both technologies, has resulted in the opportunity to develop novel IoT applications. This paper presents a review of these two technologies and the obstacles and challenges that need to be overcome. Some of these challenges are the efficiency of the energy harvesting, communication interference, fault tolerance, higher capacities to handling data processing, cost feasibility, and an appropriate integration of these factors. Additionally, two emerging trends in IoT are reviewed: the combination of RFID and WSNs in order to exploit their advantages and complement their limitations, and wearable sensors, which enable new promising IoT applications.
Highlights
The paradigm of the Internet of things (IoT) is mainly focused on providing thousands of small interconnected devices that can collaboratively work together with a common purpose
Computational RFID (CRFID) systems are practically immune to environmental interactions, and they can produce more accurate and very selective outcomes at the expense of a higher level of harvested energy
There are several types of sensor nodes that can enable a great variety of applications: Terrestrial sensors, which are deployed or pre-planned in terrestrial environment; Underground sensors that can be deployed in caves, mines or under the soil, something which limits the replacement of their batteries; Mobile sensors, which can monitor the physical environment, the habitat or track a target; and multimedia sensors that can store, save or process multimedia data such as audio or video, requiring high bandwidth, QoS and power
Summary
The paradigm of the Internet of things (IoT) is mainly focused on providing thousands of small interconnected devices that can collaboratively work together with a common purpose. These devices are smart but simple objects with sensing and wireless communication capabilities [1,2] In this framework, two technologies are mainly used, and are becoming the two fundamental pillars of the IoT: radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensors networks (WSNs) [3]. RFID is an auto identification technology that uses two main types of devices: a reader, which is the master of the communication, and the tags, which have an associated electronic code they use so as to be uniquely identified. The combination of RFID and WSN represents a very promising approach to meet the current challenges in IoT, and has created an opportunity to develop novel IoT applications [7,8,9,10,11] Another outstanding type of wireless sensors are wearable sensors.
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