Single tag sharing scheme for multiple-object RFID applications

Abstract

RFID systems have been widely adopted in various industrial as well as personal applications. However, traditional RFID systems are limited to address only one tag for each application object. This limitation hinders the usability of RFID applications because it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish many tags simultaneously with existing RFID systems. In this paper, we propose a new RFID tag structure to support multiple-objects that can be easily shared by many different RFID applications. That is, the proposed RFID tag structure supports that a tag maintains several different objects and allows those applications to access them simultaneously. We also propose an authentication protocol to support multiple-object RFID applications. Especially, we focus on the efficiency of the authentication protocol by considering different security levels in RFID applications. The proposed protocol includes two types of authentication procedures. In the proposed protocol, an object has its security level and goes through one of different authentication procedures suitable for its security level. We report the results of a simulation to test the performance of the proposed scheme. In our simulation, we considered the safety of our scheme against potential attacks and evaluated the efficiency of the proposed protocol.