A Case Study of Two Australian RFID Projects

14 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/09/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING T he ability to track individual objects is essential to many aspects of modern life, such as manufacturing, logistics, counterterrorism, and anti-counterfeiting. RFID — a wireless communication technology useful for precisely identifying objects — uses radio-frequency (RF) waves to transfer identifying information between tagged objects and readers without line of sight, thus enabling automatic tracking and tracing.1,2 Passive RFID can track products in supply chains from the supplier to the distribution center, warehouse, and point of sale. In a typical deployment, RFID tags are affixed to individual products, and readers installed at various checkpoints capture tag-reading events. Companies then transport these tagged items along the supply chain, leaving trails of tag-reading events behind. This lets those companies precisely record product movement. Unfortunately, passive RFID technology has limitations, both in terms of physical constraints placed on signal transmissions and how much data a tag can store.1 To access more data about a product (such as its production date, batch number, or package size), organizations could store most of that information externally in a central data warehouse and use the RFID tag as a key. All organizations would have to agree on a common storage format and continuously upload their data to the central warehouse. This approach has several severe drawbacks. CompetThe design, implementation, and deployment of large-scale RFID infrastructures