The market for radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is growing rapidly, with significant opportunities to add value, but also, because of the challenging issues that are identified in the chapters that follow, many opportunities for failure. This book brings together pioneering RFID academic research principals to analyze engineering issues that have hampered the deployment of RFID and to share “best practices” learnings from their work, building on the tradition of the Auto-ID Labs. The Auto-ID Labs consortium of leading universities around the world includes Auto-ID Labs at Cambridge University, Fudan University, Keio University, the University at St. Gallen and the ETH Zürich, the University at Adelaide and, most recently, the ICU, South Korea. The principal investigators represented here have conceived, obtained funding for, and executed research projects using RFID technology. The authors share their experience in the design, test, prototyping, and piloting of RFID systems, both to help others avoid “reinventing the wheel” and to set the stage for what is next in RFID.

Because RFID technology has evolved from proprietary systems operating at different frequencies in jurisdictions with different RF regulatory restrictions, most RFID work has been divided into communities operating at one frequency or another. In RFID Technology and Applications we bring together principal investigators with experience in passive RFID systems across a range of frequencies including UHF 860–960 MHz (EPC GenII/ISO 18000–6c) and HF 13.56 MHz (ISO 18000-3), but also, breaking with precedent, we include experts in active (with power) RFID systems.

In industries including aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and perishables, as covered in the preceding chapters, counterfeit trade has developed into a severe problem. While established security features such as holograms, micro printings, and chemical markers do not seem to efficiently avert trade in illicit imitation products, RFID technology, with its potential to automate product authentications, may become a powerful tool to enhance brand and product protection. The following contribution aims at structuring the requirement definition for such a system by providing a non-formal attack model, and outlines several principal approaches to RFID-based solutions.

Counterfeit trade and implications for affected enterprises

Intangible assets constitute a considerable share of many companies' equity. They are often the result of extensive investments in research and development, careful brand management, and a consistent pledge to deliver high quality and exclusiveness. However, the growth of markets in Asia, where these intangible assets are difficult to protect, the trend in favor of dismantling border controls to ease the flow of international trade, and the increasing interaction of organizations in disparate locations require new measures to protect these assets and safeguard companies from unfair competition. Especially product counterfeiting, the unauthorized manufacturing of articles that mimic certain characteristics of genuine goods and may thus pass off as products of licit companies, has developed into a threat to consumers and brand owners alike.

Counterfeit trade appears to affect a wide range of industries.

Introduction

In June 2003, Wal-Mart asked its top 100 suppliers to begin using RFID tags on pallets and cases shipped to the Dallas, Texas region by January 2005. This announcement, coupled with initiatives by companies such as Metro, Tesco, and Albertson's, propelled the RFID industry forward. In the period since that announcement, companies have worked feverishly to understand and utilize RFID in their supply chain in order to meet retailers' requirements and, more importantly, create business value for themselves. Initial RFID implementations predominately affected only a small portion of the supply chain (from retailer distribution center to store backroom) and focused on tagging pallets and cases. Given this limited supply chain exposure, determining the payback and, ultimately, creating business value have proven challenging. Early research is, however, providing evidence that, even under the aforementioned restrictive conditions, RFID is yielding a positive return: (1) Gillette found that RFID makes a difference in the tracking and managing of promotions [1]; (2) MIT's work on electronic proof-of-delivery (ePOD) at the retail distribution center revealed a valuable use of RFID [2]; and (3) results from a Wal-Mart-supported University of Arkansas study suggested that RFID can help reduce out-of-stocks [3]. Given the limited scope – i.e. retailer distribution center and store; pallets and cases only – it is very encouraging that solid business cases have already been found. In reality, these preliminary uses of RFID in the supply chain are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Introduction

The five years from 2000 saw enormous developments in the way in which technologies such as RFID could be deployed in the consumer goods supply chain as illustrated in the preceding chapter (Ch. 9). While many of these developments were generic, it became increasingly clear that other sectors would need to make substantial adjustments were they to capitalize on the significant cost reductions and standards developments that had occurred. It was for this reason that the Auto ID Labs set up the Aerospace ID Programme. The aim of the programme was

The barriers to be examined ranged from issues of technical feasibility, via economic viability hurdles, to questions of operational viability – that is, whether solutions could survive a harsh range of operating conditions. These hurdles to be addressed (see Fig. 10.1) served as a sanity check for setting the research directions which are reported in Section 10.5.

This chapter tells the story of the Aerospace ID Programme, its formation, its operations, and the results.

Background

As mentioned above, the background to the Aero ID Programme was the major development in the use of RFID in the consumer goods industry, led by the Auto ID Center and exemplified by the major initiative from Wal-Mart in 2004.

This book is addressed to business management and project managers as well as researchers who are evaluating the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) for tracking uniquely identified objects. In an effort to make RFID project management less of an art form and more of a science RFID Technology and Applications brings together pioneering RFID academic research principals to analyze engineering issues that have hampered the deployment of RFID and to share “best practices” learnings from their work. By extending the original work of the Auto-ID Center at MIT and the subsequent Auto-ID Labs consortium led by MIT that now comprises seven world-renowned research universities on four continents, this book seeks to establish a baseline for what RFID technology works today and identifies areas requiring research on which other researchers in academic, commercial, and regulatory agencies can build.

The researchers represented in these pages have gathered on three continents in the course of the RFID Academic Convocations, a research collaboration hosted by the Auto-ID Labs that started in January of 2006, at MIT, and was followed by events co-hosted with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Auto-ID Labs at Fudan University in Shanghai, as RFID Live! 2007 pre-conference events, and by the event in Brussels organized with the European Commission Directorate-General for Informatics (DGIT) and the Auto-ID Labs at Cambridge University. These Convocations bring together academic researchers with industry representatives and regulatory stakeholders to collaborate across disciplines and institutions to identify challenges faced by industry in adopting RFID technology.

From an historical perspective it is the small CMOS integrated circuits (versus inductively coupled transponders) which incorporated microwave Schottky diodes that made it possible to manufacture small passive RFID tags. In this chapter it is demonstrated how recent improvements in CMOS technology (0.18u and later) make it possible to use an inexpensive MOS transistor for the EPC GenII/ISO 18000-6c compliant transponders that operate in the UHF band. The basic variables for designing low-power (high-readability) RFID tags and details of incorporating temperature sensors into semiconductor chip designs at the Auto-ID Labs, Fudan University, Shanghai are described.

This chapter explores chip design principles that affect the performance of RFID tags. The metrics of tag performance will be illustrated and the corresponding optimization technologies will be introduced. Many early implementation issues for RFID tags involved low read rates such that tags did not “wake up” in response to interrogator signals and transmit their IDs, especially with transponders operating at UHF frequencies that are subject to interference from liquids and metals.

Metrics of tag performance

In RFID applications, tag performance will directly influence the success of the whole system. Understanding the metrics of tag performance is important in order to foresee the overall system performance. This section will analyze the metrics of tag performance, including read range, read rate, communication speed, etc.

An act of government, in this case the State of California, is the driving force behind the research topic addressed in this chapter. The use of RFID to establish an ePedigree in the pharmaceutical supply chain brings to a head basic RFID frequency and technology choices that are available from vendors today. This chapter describes how the RFID Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh works with pharmacy distribution and retail as they evaluate different requirements specific to the healthcare life sciences industry.

Different RFID reader environments and the physics of RFID that impact systems performance, including fundamentals of orientation, are characterized in order to explain different findings from pharmaceutical industry HF RFID pilots and from fast-moving consumer goods retail UHF RFID implementations. Alternatives of HF and UHF, namely near-field and far-field RFID options, are explored (the analogy is to compare an RF environment that is like “a prisoner in a cell” with an RF environment like “a bird in the sky”), and performance models are presented and evaluated with respect to constricted orientation and distance in real-world scenarios. A systematic layered approach for analyzing RFID interrogator-to-tag RF protocols is proposed, an insight that, should it be adopted by reader manufacturers, would dramatically improve RFID reader interoperability and testing. Recommendations are made with respect to modeling RFID systems performance and where pilots can help prepare the way for full implementation of RFID systems.

While the origins of RFID lie more than 50 years in the past, passive RFID technology is actually only in its infancy. This might seem an odd statement given that other technologies which have had a comparable history – computers for example – are considered mature. What makes RFID different?

The reason is that RFID, perhaps more than other technologies, is a systems technology that transcends the reader and the tag. Readers and tags are rarely, if ever, used alone. They are components of much larger systems, some of which they augment, and many of which they fundamentally enable. There are many other components to the system in which RFID participates, and, for RFID to really blossom, every component of the system must blossom. So every new advance in, say, battery technology or networking will launch a new wave of creativity and invention in RFID. This will create new applications. These new applications will increase the demand for products, further subsidizing research, and thus laying the seeds for the next invention and the next wave. It is my firm belief that RFID is currently only in its first wave.

EPC technology, developed first by the Auto-ID Center and then by EPCglobal, probably represents the state-of-the-art of the first wave of RFID. Today, EPC tags are being deployed worldwide in thousands of sites and billions of EPC tags have been read. Passive EPC tags are being used for intra- and inter-company applications on a scale perhaps never seen before.

The cold chain is a concept resulting from the field of the transformation and distribution of temperature-sensitive products. It refers to the need to control the temperature in order to prevent the growth of micro-organisms and deterioration of biological products during processing, storage, and distribution. The cold chain includes all segments of the transfer of food from the producer to the consumer. Each stage crossed by a temperature-sensitive product is related to the preceding one and has an impact on the following one. Thus, when a link of this “cold chain” fails, it inevitably results in a loss of quality and revenue, and, in many cases, leads to spoilage.

The cold chain concept can also be applied to many other industries (pharmaceuticals, dangerous goods, electronics, artifacts, etc.) that require the transport of products needing to be kept within a precise temperature range, in particular at temperatures close to 0 °C, or even below [1]. Owing to very strict rules from government agencies the expression “cold chain” has even become one of the key sentences at the heart of current concerns in the pharmaceutical field and in biotechnology [2].

The food industry

Temperature is the characteristic of the post-harvest environment that has the greatest impact on the storage life of perishable food products. In some regions of the globe, especially in tropical and subtropical regions, post-harvest losses of horticultural crops are estimated to be more than 50% of the production due to poor post-harvest handling techniques such as bad temperature management.

In the chapter that follows a test methodology is proposed for evaluating active RFID systems performance with wireless localization technology. While the problem of locating objects has been largely addressed for outdoor environments with such technologies as GPS, for indoor radio propagation environments the location problem is recognized to be very challenging, due to the presence of severe multipath and shadow fading. Several companies are now developing products to use RFID technology together with traditional localization techniques in order to provide a solution to the indoor localization problem. However, the performance of such systems has been found to vary widely from one indoor environment to another. A framework and design for a real-time testbed for evaluating indoor RFID positioning systems is described.

Historically radio direction-finding is the oldest form of radio navigation. Before 1960 navigators used movable loop antennas to locate commercial AM stations near cities. In some cases they used marine radiolocation beacons, which share a range of frequencies just above AM radio with amateur radio operators. LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation) systems also used time-of-flight radio signals, from radio stations on the ground, whereas VOR (VHF omnidirectional range) systems in aircraft use an antenna array that transmits two signals simultaneously. The UWB two-way time transfer technique allows even more accurate calculation of distances for location tracking. Choices for in-building tracking systems are covered in the following chapter, including angle of arrival (AOA), received signal strength (RSS), time of arrival (TOA), and time difference of arrival (TDOA).

Introduction and motivation

In the future, when the Internet of Things becomes reality, serialized data (typically RFID and/or barcode, based on EPCglobal, DOD/UID, and other standards) can potentially be stored in millions of data repositories worldwide. In fact, large data volumes of serialized information may be coming soon, as the global healthcare industry moves towards deploying anti-counterfeiting standards as soon as 2009. Such data will be sent to enterprise applications through the EPC network infrastructure. The data volume, message volume, communication, and applications with EPC network infrastructure will raise challenges to the scalability, security, extensibility, and communication of current IT infrastructure. Several architectures for EPC network infrastructure have been proposed. So far, most pilots have focused on the physical aspects of tag readings within a small network of companies. The lack of data quantifying the expected behavior of network message traffic within the future EPC network infrastructure is one of the obstacles inhibiting industry from moving to the next level. This chapter presents a simulator aimed at quantifying the message flows within various EPC network architectures in order to provide guidance for designing the architecture of a scalable and secure network.

RFID/EPC technology enables the tracking of physical objects through their lifecycles without direct human involvement. Through the wide range of initiatives, such as the one with retail giants (Wal-Mart and Target), and those with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), numerous state boards of pharmacy, aerospace companies (Airbus and Boeing), and the Department of Defense (DoD), RFID/EPC/UID has demonstrated its great value for business operation automation.

Introduction

As applications of RFID tags and systems expand, there is an increasing need to integrate sensors into RFID tags. The RFID tags being used at present in the supply chain indicate what a product is, but do not reveal any information about conditions that the product has encountered throughout its passage along the supply chain. Only a few RFID tags with sensors are commercially available and they are custom-designed tag–sensor combinations. Adding sensors that can measure environmental conditions such as temperature, vibration, chemicals, gases, and health, and the capability to interrogate the sensor outputs, can provide much needed information about the current and historical conditions of the product. The ability to incorporate sensors and possibly actuators into RFID tags would also open a whole new world of imaginable applications in homeland defense, military operations, manufacturing, animal health, medical operations, and other applications. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 1451 suite of standards [1–9] was developed to provide for “smart” transducers (sensors and actuators) and flexible network interfaces that facilitate “plug-and-play” capabilities for the transducers. The objective of this chapter is to present the current situation in RFID systems and networked transducers and to describe the strategy that is being adopted and research that will be necessary in order to incorporate “smart” sensors and actuators into existing RFID tags and systems using the IEEE 1451 suite of standards approach.

Introduction to autonomous cooperating logistic processes and handling systems

During the last few decades the structural and dynamic complexity in logistics and production has increased steadily [1]. Many causes for higher structural complexity can be found, for instance, in the integration of multiple companies in production and logistic networks. This effect is furthermore amplified by a growing internal and dynamic complexity caused, for example, by an increasing number of product variants. Likewise, dynamic customer behavior intensifies this situation [2]. All these effects combined lead to higher information requirements.

For efficient planning and control a broad and reliable basis of information is needed [3]. However, the underlying algorithms will soon face the end of computation capacity due to the large amount of information that has to be taken into account. It is foreseeable that in the future centralized planning and control methods will not be able to process all the information delivered. A solution to this dilemma is the decentralized storage of necessary information on the logistic object itself as well as the capability of local decision-making. In order to achieve this goal, logistic objects themselves have to become intelligent.

The emergence of these intelligent objects is the foundation for autonomous cooperating logistic processes [4]. The main idea of this concept is to develop decentralized and heterarchical planning and control methods as opposed to existing centralized and hierarchical planning and control approaches. It requires that interacting elements in non-predictable systems possess the ability and the possibility to render decisions independently.

The principal investigators represented in RFID Technology and Applications have presented a range of practical approaches and models to consider in preparing an RFID implementation strategy as well as for planning future research areas for use of this fast-growing technology. As Sanjay Sarma states in presenting applications for RFID (Ch. 2), passive RFID technology is still in its infancy. We have identified challenging aspects of linking autonomous agents and intelligent handling systems (Ch. 14) with large volumes of distributed data sources such as RFID (Ch. 7). Using a consistent experimental approach based on control theory, test and simulation frameworks have been proposed to help evaluate RFID performance, for applications that start with uniquely identifying products and can include exchanging this information, together with sensor and real-time location data, across enterprises.

By way of summary, three areas emerge from these research initiatives that warrant careful planning, starting with the challenges of using low-power wireless data acquisition technology, with respect both to electromagnetic performance of tags in relationship to specific products and packaging, and to downstream RF environments in which the tags are to be read. These issues have been explored in the technology section (Chs. 2–8).

A second theme is the requirement to extend visibility over entire product lifecycles, an increasingly recurrent topic as governments seek new ways to gain visibility on globalizing supply chains.