When Tags ‘Read’ Each Other: Enabling Low-Cost and Convenient Tag Mutual Identification

Though being widely used in industrial and logistic applications, current passive RFID technology still has a fundamental limitation: Individual users, who do not carry any reader, are difficult to interact with tagged items, such as retrieving their digital profiles and requesting certain association with them. Recent proposals to improve user-item interaction experience rely on special hardware such as smartphone based RID scanner. This work presents a promising approach to allow each user to interact with tagged item using only one passive tag, which is named Tag Mutual Identification Interface (TagMii). TagMii requires a user to put her user tag in a physical proximity with an item tag to express certain interactions between the user and item. The key idea behind TagMii is to utilize two experimental observations: 1) inductive coupling for detecting interaction events, and 2) channel similarity for determining the actual interacting tags. We implement TagMii using commodity off-the-shelf RID devices and conduct experiments in complex environments with rich multipath, mobility, wireless signals, electrical devices, and magnetic fields. The results show that TagMii provides accurate mutual identification. TagMii is a completely new approach for user-item interactions in pervasive environments and enables many user-friendly IoT applications with low cost and convenience.

The Internet of Things refers to the networked interconnection of everyday objects. Everyday objects, such as cars, coffee cups, refrigerators, bathtubs, andmore advanced, loosely coupled, computer resources and information services will be in interaction range of each others and will communicate with one another. The Internet of Things has the potential to be used by billions of independent devices co-operating in large or small combinations, and in shared or separated federations. It is going to be based on information about objects in the physical world and their respective surroundings. This information will be provided by “the things”, as they obtain and reveal information through RFID, wireless sensors and communication devices embedded in systems or worn by users. Through unique addressing schemes these things are able to be networked with each other on a global scale and to cooperate with neighbors and remote systems to reach common goals. During the last few years an increasing number of conferences, workshops, research projects and coordinated actions on a global as well as European level shape the current understanding of the important topics of RFID and Future Internet including Internet of Things. Buckley (2006) summarized recent trends in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) integration with Internet of Thing. The coordinated action CE RFID in Europe has published a Final report on RFID and its applications. In the report edited by Wiebking et al. (2008), a comprehensive summary of RFID and its applications are provided. In a recent publication, Khoo (2010) reviews current RFID technology, its usage, and the necessary development required for RFID technology to enable the Internet of Things. Atzori et al. (2010) describes how the basic idea is to have the pervasive presence around us by using a variety of things or objects such as RFID tags, sensors, actuators, mobile phones etc. The vision of an Internet of Things powered by next generation RFID has many potential advantages. It offers new industrial opportunities for the Information Communication Technology (ICT) market, and enable a breakthrough improvement in process efficiency and product/service quality in several application scenarios, such as environmental monitoring, e-health, intelligent transportation systems, military, and industrial plant monitoring. Moreover, it increases the usefulness of the Internet to the majority of citizens, who are interested in getting physical support to their daily needs. RFID devices and systems are showing significant potentials in applications from manufacturing, security, logistics, airline baggage management to postal tracking. The technology enables an organization to re-engineer its business processes and to increase the efficiency that results in lower costs and higher effectiveness. Manufacturers and distributors deploy RFID to handle the logistical overload that results from the large increase in global sales from electronic commerce or to improve the efficiency of an enterprise supply chain. 18

An analysis of Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) between a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) device and an Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator (ICD) is presented in this paper. In particular, the analysis focuses on the effects of EMI produced by an RFID reader on ICD operation. Thus, a brief overview of both ICD and RFID devices is presented at first. Subsequently, several experimental tests are performed inside an anechoic RF chamber, which ensures an appropriate shielding against external EMI sources. As a result, the comparison among ICD operating thresholds highlights its susceptibility against the RFID device.

Employee attendance is important data at a college, because it is related to employee performance. Information technology for presence systems exists that uses magnetic cards and biometric measurements. Lately there is a technology of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices that use radio signals to identify objects. Such RFID characteristics enable this technology to be used on employee cards connected to a computer-based presence system. Based on these conditions, this study aims to design a presence system using RFID technology. The system design uses the Rational Unified Process method, the Unified Modelling Language, with PHP and MySQL as builder software. The hardware used, in addition to a set of computers with specifications tailored to the needs, is also equipped with RFID devices. The presence system produced includes an RFID card reader, and a presence data processor. The presence system has a menu for adding employee data, employee attendance, delay identification, time management, monthly attendance recapitulation for each employee, and attendance recapitulation for all employees. This system has been trained by operators in the presence section with a very good absorption of 82% with a two hour training period. This shows that the system is relatively easy to implement.

Metamaterials are artificially engineered novel substances (or matter) that exhibit properties not found in nature. One of the earliest examples of a metamaterial structure is the split-ring resonator. This article is a current review of metamaterials, what it is, its classification, and its applications towards the field of antennas and radio frequency identification (RFID) devices. There are two major types of metamaterial antennas: leaky-wave antennas, and resonant antennas. Antennas can be made from composite right-left handed metamaterials, or antennas can be loaded with a metamaterial screen such as a shelled electrically small antenna (ESA) fed by coax. Metamaterial resonators can aid in reducing the antenna size, help improve the gain, improve the directivity, improve the return loss, and control the radiation pattern (by loading the antenna with a tunable unit). Recent advances in printing and fabricating technologies have allowed for use of metamaterial antennas in wearable gadgets and textiles; and can be used in conjunction with RFID devices and tags to advance and aid (emergency) equipment used by first responders.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been available for more than fifty years. Nevertheless, only in the last decade, the ability of manufacturing the RFID devices and standardization in industries have given rise to a wide application of RFID technology in many areas, such as inventory management, security and access control, product labelling and tracking, supply chain management, ski lift access, and so on. An RFID device consists of a number of RFID tags or transponders deployed in the environment, one or more antennas, a receiver or reader unit, and suitable software for data processing. The reader communicates with the tags through the scanning antenna that sends out radio-frequency waves. Tags contain a microchip and a small antenna. The reader decodes the signal provided by the tag, whereas the software interprets the information stored in the tagSs memory, usually related to its unique ID, along with some additional information. Compared to conventional identification systems, such as barcodes, RFID tags offer several advantages, since they allow for contactless identification, cheapness, reading effectiveness (no need of line of sight between tags and reader). Furthermore, passive tags work without internal power supply and have, potentially, a long life run. Owing to these advantageous properties, RFID technology has recently attracted the interest of the mobile robotics community that has started to investigate its potential application in critical navigation tasks, such as localization and mapping. For instance, in (Kubitz et al., 1997) RFID tags are employed as artificial landmarks for mobile robot navigation, based on topological maps. In (Tsukiyama, 2005), the robot follows paths using ultrasonic rangefinders until an RFID tag is found and then executes the next movement according to a topological map. In (Gueaieb & Miah, 2008), a novel navigation technique is described, but it is experimentally illustrated only through computer simulations. Tags are placed on the ceiling in unknown positions and are used to define the trajectory of the robot that navigates along the virtual line on the ground, linking the orthogonal projection points of the tags on the ground. In (Choi et al., 2011) a mobile robot localization technique is described, which bases on a sensor fusion that uses an RFID system and ultrasonic sensors. Passive RFID tags are arranged in a fixed pattern on the floor and absolute coordinate values are stored in each tag. The global position of the mobile robot is obtained by considering the tags located within the reader recognition area. Ultrasonic sensors are used to compensate for limitations and uncertainties in RFID system. 13

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are being intensively used recently for automated identification. Every object can be detected as one form of an electronic code. At the beginning, the main purpose of RFID tag usage is meant to be an improvement of barcodes. Besides the fact that an RFID tag does not need line of sight to obtain its ID, the tag is also water and dirt resistant. Moreover, it also has a read-and-writable memory chip, which can store much more data than a barcode, and is difficult to be imitated. The above are the main factors that many enterprises and government associations consider to extensively apply the RFID technology to many applications. An RFID tag is composed of two major components: an IC to store data and to handle communication processing and an attached antenna to transmit and receive radio signal. There are several types of RFID tags based on the differences of their power sources and communication methods. In general, a passive RFID tag does not have an internal power supply, and cannot work without collecting continuous wave from a reader. Oppositely, an active RFID tag has an attached battery and can communicate with other tags or reader on its own. A semi-passive tag is a mixed of above two types, which has an external battery for its operating power and yet communicates with reader in the same way as a passive tag does. In an RFID system, a reader is able to communicate with many tags within its coverage. However the tag identification process may fail when multiple tags are sending their data simultaneously. The signals from the tags may interfere with each other and hence the reader may not receive any correct data at all. If this happens, the tags will have to retransmit their data, which wastes the tag reading time and hence degrades the system performance. Such a problem is often called “tag collision” in an RFID system. To overcome the tag collision problem, researchers are still looking for the most effective anti-collision method to achieve high speed detection with nearly 100% data accuracy ID retrieval. The collision problems are usually classified into two types: the reader collision problems and tags collision problems (Burdet 2004; Dong-Her Shih 2006; Okkyeong Bang 2009). In this chapter, we focus on the latter one. The tag collision problems are in conjunction with the anti-collision protocols used in various RFID systems, of which the objective is to retrieve a tag’s ID accurately with low transmission power, low computational complexity, and minimum time delay. In the

This article proposes a standalone radio frequency identification (RFID)-based mobile robot navigation method, in which a mobile robot equipped with reader antennas can be continuously guided to a static object marked with a single passive UHF RFID tag. An observation model based on the RFID phase difference is built and integrated into a particle filter, by which the instantaneous relative position between the mobile robot and the tagged object can be detected in real time. Based on the position information extracted from the RFID system, the mobile robot adjusts its pose to move toward the RFID-tagged object. Compared with the existing RFID-based mobile robot navigation methods, the proposed method requires no external sensors other than the RFID and requires only a single passive tag. Experiments using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID devices are performed, and the results indicate that the mobile robot can satisfactorily realize navigation task with a distance accuracy of 4.04 cm and a bearing accuracy of 2.23°. The proposed method is well applicable for the navigation scenes in which the absolute position of the tagged target object is not known beforehand. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —UHF radio frequency identification (RFID) has been widely applied as an asset management ID sensor in many fields. RFID-based mobile robot navigation technology can further increase its application value as a location sensor. This article proposes a standalone RFID-based mobile robot navigation method, in which the reference tag and the external sensors other than RFID are both not required. In the proposed method, only a single passive tag is attached to the static target object. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can enable navigation task with good performance in situations in which the absolute navigation goal position is not known in advance.

Now day's application had focus more on the security and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) had become one of the major technologies that become important for security. RFID devices are going to be ubiquitous applications that are used in different areas especially in the business because it simplifies many business transactions. However, security and privacy issues and risks are introduced by pervasiveness of RFID systems. In RFID systems, communication between tag and reader usually takes place via wireless communication. As the nature of radio frequency signal, it can go everywhere and everyone can receive this signal, which is an insecure channel. The computational resources in RFID tag are constrained and it is a big limitation that forces researcher to apply different mitigations compared to common security solutions. At the first part of this research, RFID architecture is introduced briefly. In this paper, the researcher explains existing security challenges in RFID networks then the effects of these threats on security and privacy of RFID are discussed. After analyzing security challenges of RFID networks, different countermeasures that are proposed by other researchers are discussed. At the end of this paper, future security challenges are discussed.

The quasi-loop antenna for surface acoustic wave (SAW) radio frequency identification (RFID) device has been presented in the paper. It operates at frequency 433 MHz that is commonly used for RFID (ISO 18000-7). The main advantage of the solution is antenna feeding elements elimination as a result of precise SAW and antenna input admittance design. For this reason the whole system is very small and low cost.

The increasing need for automated surveillance systems in indoor environments such as airports, warehouses, production plants, etc. has stimulated the development of intelligent systems based on mobile sensors. Differently from traditional non-mobile surveillance systems, those based on mobile robots are still in their initial stage of development, and many issues are currently open for investigation (Everett, 2003; DehuaI et al., 2007). The use of robots significantly expands the potential of surveillance systems, which can evolve from the traditional passive role in which the system can only detect events and trigger alarms, to active surveillance in which a robot can be used to interact with the environment, with humans or with other robots for more complex cooperative actions (Burgard et al., 2000; Vig & Adams, 2007). A major challenge in surveillance tasks using mobile robots is that of providing the robot with a suitable knowledge of the environment to both navigate safely and perform inspection tasks. Furthermore, in order to effectively exploit mobility and multifunctionality, it is important to develop integrated control systems, capable of addressing simultaneously a number of problems, such as task planning, dynamic task sequencing, resolution of conflicts for shared resources, event-based feedback control. These issues are part of our current research concerning the development of a multi-sensor Surveillance Mobile Robot (SMR). The SMR consists of a commercial mobile robot (see Fig. 1), which is equipped with various sensors including a laser rangefinder and a Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) device, and takes advantage of a hybrid control architecture to implement both high-level functions, like mission execution monitoring, and low-level reactive control. So far, several behaviours and tasks have been implemented and experimented. In this chapter, we focus on environment mapping and exploration using RFID technology. An RFID device typically consists of radio frequency (RF) tags, a reader with one or more antennas, and software to process the tag readings. The reader interrogates the tags, receiving their ID code and other information stored in their memory. Tags can be either passive or active. Passive tags are activated by the electromagnetic field generated by the RFID antenna. Active tags, instead, are powered by an on-board battery (Finkenzeller, 2003). Applications of RFID include inventory management, industry automation, ID badges and 2

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160; Billions of passive radiofrequency tags are produced by the Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) industry every year to identify goods remotely. New research and business applications are continuously arising, including recently localization and sensing for earth science. Indeed, the cost of tags is often several orders of magnitudes below conventional outdoor sensors used in earth science, allowing to deploy up to thousands of tags with minimal investment. Furthermore, passive wireless tags require little maintenance, which fits well for years-long monitoring. This study reviews the earth science applications that are being developed today, that use RFID devices available on the market, i.e., 900&amp;amp;#160;MHz far-field tags and 125&amp;amp;#160;kHz near-field tags.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160; Ground displacements of centimeters to hundreds of meters can be monitored using RFID location techniques. Indeed, RFID tags were firstly used in earth science to track the displacement of riverine and coastal sediments due to bedloading. Near-field tags inserted in pebbles can be identified typically up to 0.5&amp;amp;#160;m from the reading device even when buried. The tags are read either by fixed portals or by a mobile device, obtaining either high space or time resolution data, respectively. Very recently, measuring the phase difference of arrival of far-field tags allowed to estimate displacements with centimetric accuracy, with a tag-reader distance up to 50&amp;amp;#160;m. That allowed measuring the ground displacements continuously relatively to a fixed reader, or to estimate tags location placed on the ground by carrying a reader over a drone using the synthetic aperture radar method. Alternatively, RFID tags can also be used for sensing the evolution over time of the temperature, moisture level, vibrations, resonant frequency or crack opening of a geologic object.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;amp;#160; This review presents multiple applications for monitoring unstable rock/earth structures using RFID. First, slow landslides can be monitored with accurate displacement monitoring and with soil moisture sensors. Then, prone-to-failure rock columns could be monitored by sensing crack opening or resonant frequency, using the same tags as with the concrete structure applications. Finally, sediment loading due to rapid mass movements such as floods, debris flows, tsunami or typhoons, have been studied largely using tags placed into pebbles.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Author&amp;amp;#8217;s published work on the topic:&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;ul&amp;gt;&amp;lt;li&amp;gt;Le Breton, M., Baillet, L., Larose, E., Rey, E., Benech, P., Jongmans, D., Guyoton, F., 2017. Outdoor UHF RFID: Phase Stabilization for Real-World Applications. IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification 1, 279&amp;amp;#8211;290.&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt; &amp;lt;li&amp;gt;Le Breton, M., Baillet, L., Larose, E., Rey, E., Benech, P., Jongmans, D., Guyoton, F., Jaboyedoff, M., 2019. Passive radio-frequency identification ranging, a dense and weather-robust technique for landslide displacement monitoring. Engineering Geology 250, 1&amp;amp;#8211;10.&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt; &amp;lt;li&amp;gt;Le Breton, M., 2019. Suivi temporel d&amp;amp;#8217;un glissement de terrain &amp;amp;#224; l&amp;amp;#8217;aide d&amp;amp;#8217;&amp;amp;#233;tiquettes RFID passives, coupl&amp;amp;#233; &amp;amp;#224; l&amp;amp;#8217;observation de pluviom&amp;amp;#233;trie et de bruit sismique ambiant (PhD Thesis). Universit&amp;amp;#233; Grenoble Alpes, ISTerre, Grenoble, France.&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/ul&amp;gt;

BackgroundDigital networks, mobile devices, and the possibility of mining the ever-increasing amount of digital traces that we leave behind in our daily activities are changing the way we can approach the study of human and social interactions. Large-scale datasets, however, are mostly available for collective and statistical behaviors, at coarse granularities, while high-resolution data on person-to-person interactions are generally limited to relatively small groups of individuals. Here we present a scalable experimental framework for gathering real-time data resolving face-to-face social interactions with tunable spatial and temporal granularities.Methods and FindingsWe use active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices that assess mutual proximity in a distributed fashion by exchanging low-power radio packets. We analyze the dynamics of person-to-person interaction networks obtained in three high-resolution experiments carried out at different orders of magnitude in community size. The data sets exhibit common statistical properties and lack of a characteristic time scale from 20 seconds to several hours. The association between the number of connections and their duration shows an interesting super-linear behavior, which indicates the possibility of defining super-connectors both in the number and intensity of connections.ConclusionsTaking advantage of scalability and resolution, this experimental framework allows the monitoring of social interactions, uncovering similarities in the way individuals interact in different contexts, and identifying patterns of super-connector behavior in the community. These results could impact our understanding of all phenomena driven by face-to-face interactions, such as the spreading of transmissible infectious diseases and information.

In a study carried out in 2004, Ireland ranked as the second most sophisticated country after Sweden in terms of its use of ICT in business (Booz, Allen Hamilton, 2004). This paper reviews an innovative technology, Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) which could have major impacts on national and international business. A study was undertaken to critically evaluate the readiness of Irish companies for RFID, focusing particularly on the retail industry. This study attempts to explain the reasoning behind the lack of preparedness for what could be a beneficial and transformational technology. The marketing implications of RFID are discussed and suggestions for further research into the implementation challenges of this technology are posited. In considering marketing as an 'information-handling problem' (Holland and Naude, 2004), ICTS such as RFID can bring clarity, control and rigour to what was once intuitive and guesswork (Friend and Walker, 2001). The benefits that RFID can bring include more accurate data delivered in real-time and a deeper knowledge of customer behaviour, not possible with current marketing IT systems. This exploratory study indicates that the majority of retailers who participated are not prepared for RFID, or its implications such as increased data. Thus RFID appears to be another technology which links to the Brady et al (2004) contention that most ICTs in marketing are both overlooked, and in turn underexploited. The authors call for more in-depth research into the opportunities and challenges that RFID could hold for business and marketing nationally and internationally. A national study should be carried out in order to show how prepared Ireland is for RFID, across a variety of different industries. Ireland could be regarded essentially as a mini-laboratory for future RFID research, with the island hosting a major study followed by a national implementation initiative which could monitor RFID implementation for best practices for national and international deployment.

Eliminating intervention operations during lower completion deployment whilst mitigating risk and associated costs has become a significant challenge in the Oil &amp; Gas industry. Demonstrating innovative solutions which provide alternatives to conventional ball drop or dart-based systems for reservoir isolation has been a must for many operators. This paper focuses on the adoption of an intervention-less Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Reservoir Isolation Valve (RIV) for critical lower completion installations. Utilizing standard isolation methods such as balls/seats, darts, and indeed e-line conveyed intervention plugs has been shown to introduce complexity, risk and cost implications on the types of operations required to isolate the lower completion. These complexities can manifest themselves in the form of increased intervention time along with associated technical challenges in circulating balls/darts onto seats, depending on the chosen isolation method. To mitigate these risks, an RFID remotely activated Reservoir Isolation Valve (RIV) was developed, which was shown to alleviate the concerns by providing multiple built-in downhole contingencies considered to be standard across the platforms. Following a thorough review of the operation requirements along with the associated historical challenges compared to conventional isolation methods, the intervention-less RFID RIV solution was developed, manufactured, tested, and subsequently deployed in a horizontal well. The technology is installed in the open position and is activated by specifically engineered RFID tags encased in a transportation carrier which allows it to be introduced to the flow stream and pumped to the toe of the well, even in highly deviated/horizontal reservoir sections. Once the RFID tag has reached the onboard electronics in the RIV, it passes a pre-programmed command to the RIV instructing it to close after a pre-determined time interval and isolate the lower completion. The programming logic also allows for built-in "timer" contingencies in the unlikely event that the RFID tags do not reach the tool as intended. The RIV was deployed successfully and provided "on-demand" reservoir isolation at the first attempt by circulating the RFID tags to depth. Subsequent operations, such as liner hanger/OH (open-hole) packer setting and the remote opening of the sand screens, were then performed against the closed liner system enabled by the RFID RIV. This paper details the novel approach taken by the application of RFID isolation systems and explains the benefits demonstrated when an RFID RIV was installed as part of a lower completion system for a critical application. What drove the success of this trial was the focus on risk mitigation compared with conventional systems designed to provide positive toe isolation, which ultimately provided a reservoir barrier and means to complete as per program.