Energy-conserving access protocols for identification networks

A myriad of applications are emerging, in which energy conservation is a critical system parameter for communications. Radio frequency identification device (RFID) networks, smart cards, and even mobile computing devices, in general, need to conserve energy. In RFID systems, nodes are small battery-operated inexpensive devices with radio receiving/transmitting and processing capabilities, integrated into the size of an ID card or smaller. These identification devices are designed for extremely low-cost large-scale applications, such that the replacement of batteries is not feasible. This imposes a critical energy constraint on the communications (access) protocols used in these systems, so that the total time a node needs to be active for transmitting or receiving information should be minimized. Among existing protocols, classical random access protocols are not energy conserving, while deterministic protocols lead to unacceptable delays. This paper deals with designing communications protocols with energy constraint, in which the number of time slots in which tags need to be in the active state is minimized, while the access delay meets the applications constraints. We propose three classes of protocols which combine the fairness of random access protocols with low energy requirements     

Radio frequency identification: technologies,applications, and research issues

A radio frequency identification (RFID) system is a special kind of sensor network to identify an object or a person using radio frequency transmission. A typical RFID system includes transponders (tags) and interrogators (readers): tags are attached to objects/persons, and readers communicate with the tags in their transmission ranges via radio signals. RFID systems have been gaining more and more popularity in areas such as supply chain management, automated identification systems, and any place requiring identifications of products or people. RFID technology is better than barcode in many ways, and may totally replace barcode in the future if certain technologies can be achieved such as low cost and protection of personal privacy. This paper provides a technology survey of RFID systems and various RFID applications. We also discuss five critical research issues: cost control, energy efficiency, privacy issue, multiple readers' interference, and security issue. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy-Aware Tag Anticollision Protocols for RFID Systems

Energy consumption of portable RFID readers is becoming an important issue as applications of RFID systems pervade many aspects of our lives. Surprisingly, however, these systems are not energy-aware with the focus till date being on reducing the time to read all tags by the reader. In this work, we consider the problem of tag arbitration in RFID systems with the aim of designing energy-aware anticollision protocols. We explore the effectiveness of using multiple time slots per node of a binary search tree through three anticollision protocols. We further develop an analytical framework to predict the performance of our protocols and enable protocol parameter selection. We demonstrate that all three protocols provide significant energy savings both at the reader and tags (if they are active tags) compared to the existing Query Tree protocol, while sharing the deterministic property of the latter. Further, we show that our protocols provide similar benefits even with correlated tag IDs.     

Evaluating the energy consumption of the RFID tag collision resolution protocols

RFID technology acts as a bridge to connect the physical world with the digital space, and RFID system is pervading our daily life in the last few years. The energy consumed by the reader and a tag in resolving the collisions caused by multiple tags is a key issue that affects life time of mobile reader and active tags, as well as the identification accuracy of passive tags. In this paper, the energy consumed by the reader and a tag in resolving the tag collision is examined for the commonly used RFID tag collision resolution protocols, including the frame slotted ALOHA based and the binary query tree based protocols. Numeric evaluation is also performed and the result verifies that regarding to energy consumption, the dynamic frame slotted ALOHA protocol for the Class-1 RFID system performs best among the frame slotted ALOHA protocols, and the modified binary query tree protocol also performs better than the standard binary query tree protocols.     

A new anti‐collision protocol based on information of collided tags in RFID systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has recently become an integral part of a wide range of applications. One of the challenges in RFID systems is the tag anti‐collision issue, for which several anti‐collision tag identification protocols have been proposed. This paper proposes a novel slotted ALOHA‐based RFID tag anti‐collision algorithm which can be employed for tag identification. The main idea of this algorithm is to use the information available in collision slots, called collided data, to identify tags uniquely. For this purpose, the collision slots that include only two tags are selected. Then, the non‐conflict bits in these slots are used to possibly identifying the tags. Because in the proposed algorithm readers use both single slots and also the collision slots for tag identification, the performance is increased significantly compared with other protocols. Results of the study indicate that in the proposed algorithm, the optimal frame size for an individual tag number is equal to the half of tags number and the efficiency of the proposed protocol is improved to about 73%. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

一种低功耗有源射频识别系统的设计

研究了一种低功耗有源射频识别系统组网与设计技术,该系统可在软硬件两方面实现低功耗设计。在硬件方面,采用NORDIC公司的nRF24LE1芯片作为有源标签,nRF24L01+芯片作为节点射频芯片,STM32单片机作为节点控制芯片,实现了芯片与节点的注册与通信;软件方面,采用时分复用方法,合理分配有源芯片的时隙,设计了防冲突机制,使得芯片在极端的时间内工作,实现了低功耗组网通信。     

Instant collision resolution for tag identification in RFID networks

In this paper, we approach the problem of identifying a set of objects in an RFID network. We propose a modified version of Slotted Aloha protocol to reduce the number of transmission collisions. All tags select a slot to transmit their ID by generating a random number. If there is a collision in a slot, the reader broadcasts the next identification request only to tags which collided in that slot. Besides, we present an extensive comparative evaluation of collision resolution protocols for tag identification problem in RFID networks. After a quick survey of the best performing RFID tag identification protocols, both deterministic and probabilistic, we present the outcome of intensive simulation experiments set up to evaluate several metrics, such as the total delay of identification process and the bit complexity of reader and tags. The last metric is strictly related to energy constraints required by an RFID system. The experiments point out that our protocol outperform all the other protocols in most cases, and matches them in the others.     

Lightweight Cryptographic Authentication in Passive RFID-Tagged Systems

The explosion in recent interest in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags stems primarily from advances in information processing in supply chain management. Given their processing power and memory capabilities, RFID tags can be used in a wide range of applications including those where barcodes can and cannot be used. Although the potential exists, it is hampered by the relatively high unit cost of implementation and issues related to privacy and security. As with any technology, unit cost of RFID tags and their related systems is bound to come down. As for security and privacy issues, the main impediments are limited processing power, memory, and external power to operate these tags. In spite of these resource constraints, recent years have seen a plethora of new authentication protocols that promise to alleviate security and privacy concerns associated with the use of RFID tags. We evaluate a few protocols that have been suggested for use in passive RFID-tagged systems and identify vulnerabilities that may be present. When appropriate, we present modifications of existing protocols to prevent identified vulnerabilities.     

An improved anti‐collision protocol for radio frequency identification tag

Many anti‐collision protocols have been proposed at present. Almost all known protocols exhibit an overall identification efficiency smaller than 50%. And all of them are proposed for general purpose applications and do not consider the distribution characteristic of tag IDs in different radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. In real world, there are many RFID systems, in which the tag IDs are mostly distributed continuously, such as in container terminals, warehouse management, supply chain management, and so on. This paper presents an efficient anti‐collision protocol, named improved collision tree protocol (ICT), to identify RFID tags simultaneously. The main novelties of this paper include that the duality and certainty principle is introduced and used in ICT to improve the tag identification efficiency, and the continuous and partially continuous distributions of tag IDs are taken into account in this paper. Both the theoretical and experimental results indicate that ICT improves the tag identification efficiency up to 100% when the tag IDs are distributed continuously, and always above 50% even when the tag IDs are distributed uniformly. For straightforward and efficient, ICT can be used in various RFID tag identification conditions, especially when the tag IDs are distributed continuously or partially continuously. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Flexible RFID Tag Metal Antenna on Paper‐Based Substrate by Inkjet Printing Technology

A reliable and low‐cost solution‐processing procedure to synthesize a highly adhesive flexible metal antenna with low resistivity for radio‐frequency identification device (RFID) tags on paper substrates via inkjet printing combined with surface modification and electroless deposition (ELD) is demonstrated in this paper. Through the surface modification of colloidal solution of hydrolyzed stannous chloride and chitosan solution, the paper‐based substrate is able to reduce the penetration rate of ink and further increase the adsorption amount of silver ions, which could create a catalytic activating layer to catalyze the subsequent ELD of a conductive deposited metal antenna. The resulting metal antenna for RFID tags presents good adhesive strength and low resistivity of 2.58 × 10^?8 Ω·m after 40 min of ELD, and maintains a reliable reading range of RFID tags even after over 1000 times of bending and mechanical stress. Consequently, the developed technology proposed allows for cheap, efficient, and massive production of metal antenna for paper‐based RFID tags with excellent mechanical and electrical properties. Furthermore, this process is especially advantageous for the fabrication of next‐generation flexible electronic devices based on paper substrates.     

Server‐less RFID authentication and searching protocol with enhanced security

This paper focuses on two interesting radio‐frequency identification (RFID) cryptographic protocols: the server‐less RFID authentication protocol that allows readers to authenticate tags without the help of any online backend servers, and the RFID searching protocol in which the verifier explicitly specifies the target tag to be searched and authenticated. These two kinds of RFID protocols play important roles in many RFID applications; however, the existing protocols either had security weaknesses or exhibited poor efficiency. This paper shows the weaknesses, and then proposes our server‐less RFID authentication protocol and RFID searching protocol. The proposed protocols greatly enhance the security using one more hashing. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive Binary Splitting: A RFID Tag Collision Arbitration Protocol for Tag Identification

In the RFID system, a reader recognizes tags through communications over a shared wireless channel. When multiple tags transmit their IDs at the same time, the tag-to-reader signals lead to collision. Tag collision arbitration for passive RFID tags is significant for fast identification since collisions disturb the reader's identification process. This paper presents an Adaptive Binary Splitting (ABS) protocol which is an improvement on the binary tree protocol. To reduce collisions and identify tags efficiently, ABS uses information which is obtained from the last processes of tag identification. Our performance evaluation shows that ABS outperforms other tree based tag anti-collision protocols. This work was supported by Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2005-041-D00680).     

一种轻量级隐私保护的RFID群组证明协议

设计高效安全的群组证明协议有利于RFID(Radio Frequency Identification)系统的广泛应用.本文提出了一种轻量级隐私保护的RFID群组证明协议LPGP(Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Grouping Proof),LPGP协议只使用计算复杂度比较小的伪随机发生器和散列运算来提高协议的运行效率,并且LPGP协议具有认证性、隐私性和可证明安全性,满足了RFID系统群组证明协议的安全性要求.与现有的群组证明协议相比,LPGP协议的标签只需较小的计算复杂度和存储空间,具有较高的效率.     

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.     

轻型的RFID安全认证协议LAP

RFID标签存在着处理能力弱、存储空间小和电源供给有限等局限性,传统的公钥算法或散列函数等复杂运算不能满足实际应用的需求。针对现有轻量级RFID认证协议的不足,设计了基于广义逆矩阵的RFID安全认证协议LAP。该协议采用了硬件复杂度较低的CRC校验及计算量较小的矩阵运算。通过安全隐私和性能分析,LAP协议适用于低成本、存储与计算受限的RFID标签。     

RFID sensors based on ubiquitous passive 13.56‐MHz RFID tags and complex impedance detection

Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors are attractive in diverse applications where sensor performance is needed at a low cost and when battery‐free operation is critical. We developed a general approach for adapting ubiquitous and cost‐effective passive 13.56‐MHz RFID tags for diverse sensing applications. In developed RFID sensors, the complex impedance of the RFID resonant antenna is measured and correlated to physical, chemical, or biological properties of interest. In contrast to known wireless sensors, developed RFID sensors combine several measured parameters from the resonant sensor antenna with multivariate data analysis and deliver unique capability for multianalyte sensing and rejection of environmental interferences with a single sensor. Theoretical calculations and experiments in an anechoic chamber demonstrate that the developed RFID sensors are immune to common electromagnetic interferences and the sensor/reader system operates within regulated emission levels. Performance of developed RFID sensors is illustrated in measurements of toxic industrial chemicals (TICs) in air with the detection limit (DL) of 80 parts per billion and in a non‐invasive monitoring of milk spoilage. Sensors selectivity is demonstrated in the detection of different vapors with individual sensors. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Design and Performance Analysis of Emulator for Standard Conformance Test of Active RFID

An active radio frequency identification (RFID) system has the advantages of a long identification distance and a good identification rate, overcoming passive RFID drawbacks. Therefore, interest in the development of active RFID systems has been gradually increasing in areas of harbor logistics and national defense. However, some identification failures between active RFID systems developed under the same standards have been reported, presumably due to a lack of development of accurate evaluation methods and test equipment. We present a realization of the hardware and software of an emulator to evaluate the standard conformance of an active RFID system in a fully anechoic chamber. The performance levels of the designed emulator are analyzed using Matlab/Simulink simulations, and the applicability of the emulator is verified by evaluating the standard conformance of a real active RFID tag. Finally, we propose a new evaluation method by incorporating a self‐running test mode environment into the RFID tags to reduce testing time and increase testing accuracy. The application of the suggested method to actual tags improves measurement uncertainty by 0.56 dB over that obtained using existing methods.     

Enhanced binary search with cut-through operation for anti-collision in RFID systems

RFID systems allow contactless identification of objects using radio frequency. When there is more than one transponder within the interrogation area of a reader, all the transponders may send data (or tags) at the same time which may lead to mutual interference. This event causes data loss and is referred to as a collision. In this letter, we propose an enhanced binary search with cut-through operation to minimize the anti-collision cost. The analytic results show that the proposed scheme achieves low delay in the collision resolution with low power consumption.     

ASAF ALOHA Protocol for Dense RFID Systems

RFID tags are used for varied applications in large numbers. Human Tracking is one such important application wherein the RFID system detects the presence of a tag in a dense tag environment. Quick estimation of the number of tags in the field at a desired level of accuracy is one of the most common requirements in the present scenario. Identification of tags has become a critical area which need more time and unsuitable in many situations; especially where tag set is dense. We introduce a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol for Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems which exploits the statistical information collected at the reader. The protocol, termed Adaptive Slot Adaptive Frame (ASAF) ALOHA protocol, is motivated to significantly improve the total read time performance of the currently suggested MAC protocols for RFID systems by minimizing the collisions of the tags. In order to perform this task, ASAF estimates the dynamic tag population and adapts the frame size and number of slots simultaneously in the subsequent round via a simple policy that maximizes an appropriately defined function. We demonstrated that ASAF is better than the current RFID MAC protocols. We also considered the case where suddenly if the number of tags increases, the running frame with adapted slots gets flushed away and new frame with increased number of slots gets adapted automatically by the system showing the robustness in this case as well.