Active Radio Frequency Identification System Research Articles

Fast tag identification for mobile RFID robots in manufacturing environments

Purpose In manufacturing environments, mobile radio frequency identification (RFID) robots need to quickly identify and collect various types of passive tag and active tag sensor data. The purpose of this paper is to design a robot system compatible with ultra high frequency (UHF) band passive and active RFID applications and to propose a new anti-collision protocol to improve identification efficiency for active tag data collection. Design/methodology/approach A new UHF RFID robot system based on a cloud platform is designed and verified. For the active RFID system, a grouping reservation–based anti-collision algorithm is proposed in which an inventory round is divided into reservation period and polling period. The reservation period is divided into multiple sub-slots. Grouped tags complete sub-slot by randomly transmitting a short reservation frame. Then, in the polling period, the reader accesses each tag by polling. When tags’ reply collision occurs, the reader tries to re-query collided tags once, and the pre-reply tags avoid collisions through random back-off and channel activity detection. Findings The proposed algorithm achieves a maximum theoretical system throughput of about 0.94, and very few tag data frame transmissions overhead. The capture effect and channel activity detection in physical layer can effectively improve system throughput and reduce tag data transmission. Originality/value In this paper, the authors design and verify the UHF band passive and active hybrid RFID robot architecture based on cloud collaboration. And, the proposed anti-collision algorithm would improve active tag data collection speed and reduce tag transmission overhead in complex manufacturing environments.

The value of radio frequency identification in quality management of the blood transfusion Chain in an academic hospital setting

Background: A complex process like the blood transfusion chain could benefit from modern technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID). RFID could, for example, play an important role in generating logistic and temperature data of blood products, which are important in assessing the quality of the logistic process of blood transfusions and the product itself. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate whether location, time stamp, and temperature data generated in real time by an active RFID system containing temperature sensors attached to red blood cell (RBC) products can be used to assess the compliance of the management of RBCs to 4 intrahospital European and Dutch guidelines prescribing logistic and temperature constraints in an academic hospital setting. Methods: An RFID infrastructure supported the tracking and tracing of 243 tagged RBCs in a clinical setting inside the hospital at the blood transfusion laboratory, the operating room complex, and the intensive care unit within the Academic Medical Center, a large academic hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The compliance of the management of 182 out of the 243 tagged RBCs could be assessed on their adherence to the following guidelines on intrahospital storage, transport, and distribution: (1) RBCs must be preserved within an environment with a temperature between 2°C and 6°C; (2) RBCs have to be transfused within 1 hour after they have left a validated cooling system; (3) RBCs that have reached a temperature above 10°C must not be restored or must be transfused within 24 hours or else be destroyed; (4) unused RBCs are to be returned to the BTL within 24 hours after they left the transfusion laboratory. Results: In total, 4 blood products (4/182 compliant; 2.2%) complied to all applicable guidelines. Moreover, 15 blood products (15/182 not compliant to 1 out of several guidelines; 8.2%) were not compliant to one of the guidelines of either 2 or 3 relevant guidelines. Finally, 148 blood products (148/182 not compliant to 2 guidelines; 81.3%) were not compliant to 2 out of the 3 relevant guidelines. Conclusions: The results point out the possibilities of using RFID technology to assess the quality of the blood transfusion chain itself inside a hospital setting in reference to intrahospital guidelines concerning the storage, transport, and distribution conditions of RBCs. This study shows the potentials of RFID in identifying potential bottlenecks in hospital organizations' processes by use of objective data, which are to be tackled in process redesign efforts. The effect of these efforts can subsequently be evaluated by the use of RFID again. As such, RFID can play a significant role in optimization of the quality of the blood transfusion chain.

A Review of On-Chip Micro Supercapacitors for Integrated Self-Powering Systems

Miniaturized self-powering systems that integrate both energy harvesters and energy storage units as the power sources are essential to realize maintenance-free wireless sensor networks, implantable medical devices, and active radio frequency identification systems. On-chip micro supercapacitors (MSCs) are promising candidates for energy storage in such systems by providing high power densities, fast charge/discharge rates, and long cycle life. Researchers have been improving the performances, especially energy and power densities, of MSCs in recent years. This paper reviews the fundamental working mechanisms and design considerations of on-chip MSCs with special emphasis on the advantages of 3-D configurations. Typical fabrication methods are summarized, and their effects on the device performance and system integration are analyzed. In particular, the power generation of micro energy harvesters and the power consumption of typical wireless micro systems are surveyed, providing the basic and targeting performance requirements of future MSCs that can be integrated with them. [2017-0069]

Performance Analysis of Tags Collection Time on A New Architecture of 2.4 GHz Embedded Active RFID System for Indoor and Outdoor Tracking and Monitoring Applications Based on IEEE 802.15.4 Standard

This paper focuses on the analysis of tags collection time of 2.4 GHz embedded active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system for indoor and outdoor real-time tracking and monitoring applications based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The main novelty of the system is the implementation of the communication method in order to provide Machine to Machine (M2M) communication and automated switching mechanism between indoor and outdoor location by utilizing active RFID, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Global Positioning System (GPS) and mobile communication on a single platform. In this work, GPS receiver covers outdoor location tracking, while active RFID provides identification and Receive Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) reading for each tag holder to cover indoor location tracking especially near or inside building where location information is not detected by GPS. Several experiments were conducted on three different RFID tags which were active RFID tag embedded with GPS and GSM (ERFIDG2), active RFID tag embedded with GPS (ERFIDG) and standalone RFID tag communicating with the same active RFID reader. The experiment was done to evaluate the communication performance of the active RFID in terms of tags collection time using Transparent (AT) and Application Programming Interface (API) mode. The experiment was extended to measure tags collection time in single hop and multi hops communication for Tag Talk First (TTF) and Reader Talk First (RTF) protocols. The results show that the proposed active RFID system (ERFIDG2) is better than the standalone and ERFIDG systems. The in-depth research done in this work is to study the experience and identify the challenges that will be faced in the development and implementation of a wireless RFID-based system for tracking and monitoring applications.

Improving RF Transmit Power and Received Signal Strength in 2.4 GHz ZigBee Based Active RFID System with Embedded Method

This paper describes the experiments and analysis conducted on 2.4 GHz embedded active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) – Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based system that has been developed for the purposes of location tracking and monitoring in indoor and outdoor environments. Several experiments are conducted to test the effectiveness and performance of the developed system and two of them is by measuring the Radio Frequency (RF) transmitting power and Received Signal Strength (RSS) to prove that the embedded active RFID tag is capable to generate higher transmit power during data transmission and able to provide better RSS reading compared to standalone RFID tag. Experiments are carried out on two RFID tags which are active RFID tag embedded with GPS and GSM (ER2G); and standalone RFID tag communicating with the same active RFID reader. The developed ER2G contributes 12.26 % transmit power and 6.47 % RSS reading higher than standalone RFID tag. The results conclude that the ER2G gives better performance compared to standalone RFID tag and can be used as guidelines for future design improvements.

Reference tag supported RFID tracking using robust support vector regression and Kalman filter

Site operations usually contain potential safety issues and an effective monitoring strategy for operations is essential to predict and prevent risk. Regarding the status monitoring among material, equipment and personnel during site operations, much work is conducted on localization and tracking using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. However, existing RFID tracking methods suffer from low accuracy and instability, due to severe interference in industrial sites with many metal structures. To improve RFID tracking performance in industrial sites, a RFID tracking method that integrates Multidimensional Support Vector Regression (MSVR) and Kalman filter is developed in this paper. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) facility site with long range active RFID system to evaluate the performance of this approach. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed approach with severe noise and outliers. It is feasible to adopt the proposed approach which satisfies intrinsically-safe regulations for monitoring operation status in current practice.

An Active RFID Tag-Enabled Locating Approach With Multipath Effect Elimination in AGV

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have been largely used in manufacturing and supply chain management. With the development of Auto-ID technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID), AGVs’ positioning could be enhanced. This paper demonstrates using magnetic field lines in the AGVs for precise coverage locating based on the errors’ suppression positioning method. Dolph-Chebyshev antenna array is used to enable AGVs with more precise location implementation. It is observed that the far-field active RFID system positioning accuracy is higher, the movement is more stable, and the fluctuating rate is smaller.

Advanced boundary virtual reference algorithm for an indoor system using an active RFID interrogator and transponder

Localization of persons and objects has become a necessity in many industrial services. In indoor circumstances, radio frequency identification (RFID) has superior performance. However, radio signals within indoor environments are generally weak, and the tags have very restricted abilities. In addition, the multipath propagation, total cost, and signal interference increase with increasing number of reference tags over a certain limit. Therefore, to improve the performance of indoor positioning for real-time localization, a new active acquisition method for an active RFID system that works at 2.4 GHz has been proposed; it is called the boundary virtual reference (BVIRE) algorithm. It depends on boundary virtual reference tags rather than increasing the number of real reference tags, which in turn reduces the total cost while maintaining the location accuracy. We have implemented a linear regression method to further enhance the positioning accuracy while eliminating the unnecessary tags from the estimation method using event filtering, in which only a few neighbouring reference tags are helpful in deciding the location of the object tag. The experimental results show that our BVIRE algorithm considerably reduces the error estimation compared with previous algorithms. The system has enhanced the positioning accuracy and lowered the total costs. In addition, the localization precision of the proposed approach has been significantly increased to approximately 90.25 % compared with PinPoint algorithm with no additional reference tags or radio frequency interference; this represents a significant improvement over other algorithms.

Performance Analysis of ALOHA Framework under Limited Access of Data Transmission for Active RFID System

The data collision of multiple tags to access the channel is one of the most problems in active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The technique of random tag is based on William Feller equation by considering the successful probability (Psuc) may affect to increase the data collision if the tag is not limited the privilege. This paper proposes the modification of William Feller equation by dividing the privilege of tags into several groups. The results show that our scheme can provide the better performances as comparing with William Feller equation in term of successful probability. The maximum average of successful probability is more than 0.97.

Link Budget Design with Performance Evaluation of Tunable Impulse-Based Ultra Wideband to Support the Integration of Wireless Sensing and Identifications Infrastructures

Recently, many studies propose the use of ultra-wideband technology for passive and active radio frequency identification systems as well as for wireless sensor networks due to its numerous advantages. By harvesting these advantages of IR-UWB technology at the physical-layer design, this paper proposes that a cross layer architecture platform can be considered as a good integrator for different wireless short-ranges indoor protocols into a universal smart wireless-tagged architecture with new promising applications in cognitive radio for future applications. Adaptive transmission algorithms have been studied to show the trade-off between different specific QoS requirements, transmission rates and distances at the physical layer level and this type of dynamic optimization and reconfiguration leads to the cross-layer design proposal in the paper. Studies from both theoretical simulation and statistical indoor environments experiments are considered as a proof of concept for the proposed architecture.

An Energy Efficient Active RFID Protocol to Avoid Overhearing Problem

In this paper we describe an energy efficient protocol for active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags complying with the standard. The energy efficiency is a key requirement for the wider acceptance of the active RFID systems that use battery constrained tags. The existing active RFID protocols try to reduce energy consumption of tags by putting them into sleep mode when the reader is not interrogating. To start interrogation, a reader sends a special signal that wakes up its nearby tags in sleep mode. After wake up, a tag remains in active mode during the whole interrogation period until it receives a sleep command from the reader. However, the existing protocols do not consider ineffective energy consumption of tags during the interrogation period. Overhearing is a state of a tag in which it wastes energy for maintaining active RX state while there is no frame destined to it. According to our analysis, the amount of energy consumed by a tag due to overhearing is several times larger than that consumed for the effective communication. To eliminate overhearing, a tag has to know the time and the duration of its effective communication intervals in advance, and it has to maintain active mode only for those intervals while keeping sleep mode in other intervals of the interrogation period. But, a tag is hard to know the effective communication intervals in advance with the existing protocols. We propose Reservation Aloha for No Overhearing (RANO) that is designed to inform a tag of its effective communication intervals to eliminate overhearing problem in active RFID communication. We implement them on our own designed active RFID hardware to check its validity and efficiency. Using the hardware, the number of tags, the collection time of the tags and the data volume of the tags for the collection were varied in the performance test. The results show that RANO protocols saved the energy about several dozen times than the standard protocol when the number of tags increases.

Performance of Multiple-Antennas in ISO 18000-7 Standard with Using Limited Feedback Schemes

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a pervasive wireless technology to automatically identify, track, and locate objects or people. RFID technology falls into three categories with respect to tags' energy source: passive, semi-passive and active. Active RFID tags are preferred in many applications for their advantages: Visibility, security, quality and high distance communication. Active RFID systems present a couple of challenges that are vital and should be overcome before enjoying their benefits. One of the most important new challenges is energy-efficient data gathering. ISO/IEC 18000-7, operating at 433 MHz, is one of the active RFID standards. We realize that a tag consumes too much energy source to perform a satisfactory communication compliance with the standard in Rayleigh fading channel. Motivated by this need, in this paper, we aim to ameliorate a RFID system performance from the perspective of better communication and energy efficiency. Detailed and extensively simulations show that using multiple antennas with limited feedback schemes significantly diminish the frame error rates and increase the battery lifetime. Moreover, we have evaluated the performance of the limited feedback schemes when the wireless channels are correlated and multiple antennas are present at the reader.

A Low-Collision CSMA-Based Active RFID for Tracking Applications

Hardware complexity, active Tag power consumption, and Multiple Tags collection method are three critical parameters in all active radio frequency identification systems. In this work, both the MCU and RF operations are performed in single chip, which makes the Tag hardware smaller. A lot amount of energy is restored by setting Tags in the sleep mode in the most of times. Four commands are used for this system. At first, a unique ID is dedicated to each Tag by the ID allocation command. The polling command is implemented for searching desired Tags. By using of the ID clearing command, the object loses the passing permission for a given time or permanently. Utilizing the collection command, the information of all surrounding Tags are collected and monitored, simultaneously. The Carrier Sense Multiple Access method is used and its performance is evaluated. The maximum transmission range of 80 m at the output power of 4.5 dBm is obtained. An active Tag with unique ID is mounted on each vehicle. Receiver sensitivity of 97 dBm and current consumption of 1 $$\mu \text{ A}$$ in the sleep mode and 29.6 mA in the active mode are reported.

능동형 RFID 시스템을 위한 효율적인 Slotted CSMA/CA 충돌방지 프로토콜의 구현

Tag collection is one of the major concerns in radio frequency identification(RFID) system. All tags in RFID reader's transmission range send response message back to the reader in response to collection request message on the given rf channel. When multiple tags respond simultaneously, tag-collision may occur. Tag-collision problem is one of the most important issues in active RFID performance. To mitigate this problem, frame slotted ALOHA(FSA) anti-collision protocol is widely used in active RFID system. Several studies show that the maximum system efficiency of FSA anti-collision protocol is 36.8%. In this paper, we propose an efficient slotted CSMA/CA protocol to improve tag collection performance. We compare our protocol to the FSA anti-collision protocol. For the experiment, an 433MHz active RFID system is implemented, which is composed of an RFID reader and multiple tags. We evaluated the tag collection performance using one RFID reader and 40 tags in the real test bed. The experimental result shows that proposed protocol improves the tag collection time, round and collision probability by 18%, 37.4% and 77.8%, respectively.

Cross-layer architecture of impulse-based ultra wideband to support the integration of Radio Frequency Identification and wireless sensor network infrastructures

Many research studies have recently proposed the use of Impulse Radio based ultra-wideband technology for passive and active radio frequency identification systems as well as for wireless sensor networks because of its numerous advantages. To harness these advantages at the physical-layer level of design, cross-layer architecture can be used to integrate different wireless short-range requirements into a smart wireless-tagged architecture. Adaptive transmission algorithm has been studied to show the trade-off flexibility between different specific quality of service requirements and transmission rate parameters at the physical-layer level in varied distance scenarios. This type of dynamic optimization and reconfiguration leads to the cross-layer design proposal introduced in this paper. The results of the theoretical and simulated analyses as well as the dedicated experimental design and implementations prove the validity of the proposed architecture.

ISS-TCA: An Identified Slot Scan-Based Tag Collection Algorithm for Performance Improvement in Active RFID Systems

The standard tag collection algorithm (TCA) in ISO/IEC 18000-7 has difficulty in collecting data from a massive number of active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in a timely manner, so it should be improved to allow successful application of active RFID systems to a wide variety of industrial fields. We propose a novel TCA, which is an identified slot scan-based TCA (ISS-TCA), to improve the performance of tag collection (TC) in active RFID systems. In the proposed ISS-TCA, an active RFID reader differentiates identified slots from collided and empty slots via an ISS phase, in which active RFID tags send minimal responses. The reader then avoids collided and empty slots in the following TC phase, in which it collects the actual data from the tags. This reduces the cost of collided and empty slots during TC, resulting in improved TC performance. We carried out simulations to evaluate and compare the performances of the standard TCA and the proposed ISS-TCA in TC. The simulation results with up to 500 tags showed that the proposed ISS-TCA reduced the average time required for TC by 33.2% or 27.3% when the reader collected 50 or 100 bytes of additional data from the tags, respectively. We also experimentally evaluated the performance improvement of TC by the proposed ISS-TCA using an active RFID reader and 60 tags that were implemented for this paper. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed ISS-TCA could improve the TC performance in practice, confirming the simulation results, and showed that it could also decrease the average battery consumption of the tags by 39.3%.

Collision-free arbitration protocol for active RFID systems

Collisions between tags greatly reduce the identification speed in radio frequency identification (RFID) systems and increase communication overhead. In particular for an active RFID system, tags are powered by small batteries, and a large number of re-transmissions caused by collisions can deteriorate and exhaust the tag energy which may result in missing tags. An efficient collision-free arbitration protocol for active RFID systems is proposed in this paper. In this protocol, a new mechanism involving collision detection, collision avoidance, and fast tag access is introduced. Specifically, the pulse burst duration and busy-tone- detection delay are introduced between the preamble and data portion of a tag-to-reader (T-R) frame. The reader identifies tag collision by detecting pulses and transmits a busy tone to avoid unnecessary transmission when collision occurs. A polling process is then designed to quickly access the collided tags. It is shown that the use of the proposed protocol results in a system throughput of 0.612, which is an obvious improvement when compared to the framed- slotted ALOHA (FSA) arbitration protocol for ISO/IEC 18000- 7 standard. Furthermore, the proposed protocol greatly reduces communication overhead, which leads to energy conservation.

Survey of RFID and Its Application to International Ocean/Air Container Tracking

“Internet of Things” (IoT) requires information to be collected from “anything”, “anytime”, and “anywhere”. In order to achieve this, wireless devices are required that have (1) automatic data acquisition capability, (2) small size, (3) long life, and (4) long range communication capability. One way to meet these requirements is to adopt active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. Active RFID is more advantageous than passive RFID and enables higher data reading performance over longer distances. This paper surveys active RFID systems, the services they currently promise to provide, technical problems common to these services, and the direction in which research should head in the future. It also reports the results of EPCglobal (EPC: Electronic Product Code) pilot tests conducted on global logistics for tracking ocean/air container transportation using active RFID systems for which we developed several new types of active RFID tags. The test results confirm that our active RFID tags have sufficient capability and low power consumption to well support ocean/air transportation and logistics service.

Dual-reader wireless protocols for dense active RFID identification

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) becomes increasingly widespread in various applications. However, data collision is one of the most concerns in dense active RFID systems. Data collision will cause serious data loss, slow identification speed and high energy consumption. In this paper, data collision problem is addressed and two communication protocols are presented based on the dual-reader structure. One is the master–slave dual-reader (MSDR) protocol, and the other is called the dual-reader DCMA (DRDCMA) protocol. Both protocols are implemented in the hardware platform and their performances are compared with other conventional anti-collision protocols. Experimental results show that our proposed protocols outperform the conventional ones in terms of identification rate, identification speed and energy consumption. Compared to the Single-reader (SR) protocol, the proposed MSDR protocol can improve the identification rate by 82.9%, reduce the access latency and energy consumption by 47.0%. Besides, the proposed DRDCMA protocol can reduce the access latency and energy consumption by 69.1 and 78.3%, respectively, in comparison with DCMA. Moreover, MSDR has the fastest identification speed and it can improve nearly 100% over SR when the communication load is large enough. DRDCMA presents the highest identification rate with nearly no data loss, while the identification rate in MSDR is 40.6% and decreases dramatically with the increment in communication load. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Active RFID System with Cryptography and Authentication Mechanisms

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have recently been used in a large number of applications. Security and privacy issues have also imposed significant chal- lenges on these systems. Cryptography and authentication protocols have been utilized to effectively solve the security and privacy problems in RFID systems. In this paper, we integrate public key encryption, embedded computation, and wire- less communication technologies into the active RFID system that we proposed with cryptography and authentication mechanisms. In our proposed active RFID system, a se- cure RFID Tag intermittently transmits cipher text to a RFID Reader which then trans- mits in multi-hop relaying to a back-end platform to perform data comparison for authen- tication. In addition, the digital signature scheme - Tame Transformation Signatures (TTS) has the advantages of high security, high-speed key generation, signature, and suitability to embedded systems and is thus suitable to be used in our authentication sys- tem. It is used in our proposed system to protect the plain text. The TTS algorithm is from the family of asymmetric public key systems and thus has superiority such as better security, fast key generation, complex algorithm, and low signature delay. The TTS algo- rithm can thus encrypt data and perform authentication more effectively in active RFID systems. We have three major contributions in this paper. The first is to fully design and im- plement an active RFID system which includes active Tags and Readers. In our system, the Tag can stand by and keep working in long term after getting started. The second is to successfully implement a proposed active RFID system with TTS cryptography and au- thentication mechanisms to protect the content in tags to ensure the security in multi-hop transmission. The last is to adopt multi-hop relays to extend distance between Readers.