Yan Qiao , Shigang Chen , Tao Li RFID as an Infrastructure – Monograph

RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are becoming ubiquitously available in object tracking, access control, and toll payment. The current application model treats tags simply as ID carriers and deals with each tag individually for the purpose of identifying the object that the tag is attached to. The uniqueness of this book is to change the traditional individual view to a collective view that treats universally-deployed tags as a new infrastructure, a new wireless platform on which novel applications can be developed. This chapter argues for such a paradigm shift. It introduces the problems of tag estimation and information collection from RFID systems, and explains the challenges, laying the background for the rest of the book.