Radio FREQUENCY identifi cation (RFID) technology is a wireless communication
technology that enables users to uniquely identify tagged objects or people.
RFID is rapidly becoming a cost-effective technology. This is in large part
due to the efforts of Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense (DoD) to
incorporate RFID technology into their supply chains. In 2003, with the aim
of enabling pallet-level tracking of inventory, Wal-Mart issued an RFID
mandate requiring its top suppliers to begin tagging pallets and cases, with
Electronic Product Code (EPC) labels. The DoD quickly followed suit and
issued the same mandate to its top 100 suppliers. This drive to incorporate
RFID technology into their supply chains is motivated by the increased ship-
ping, receiving and stocking effi ciency and the decreased costs of labor, storage,
and product loss that pallet-level visibility of inventory can offer.
adio FREQUENCY Identification (RFID) is a rapidly developing automatic wireless data-collection
technology with a long history.The first multi-bit functional passive RFID systems,with a range of
several meters, appeared in the early 1970s, and continued to evolve through the 1980s. Recently,
RFID has experienced a tremendous growth,due to developments in integrated circuits and radios,
and due to increased interest from the retail industrial and government.
RFID (radio-FREQUENCY identification) is the use of a wireless non-contact system
that uses radio-FREQUENCYelectromagnetic fields to transfer datafrom a tag attached
to an object, for the purposes of automatic identification and tracking [38]. The
basic technologies for RFID have been around for a long time. Its root can be traced
back to an espionage device designed in 1945 by Leon Theremin of the Soviet
Union,whichretransmittedincidentradiowaves modulatedwith audioinformation.
After decades of development, RFID systems have gain more and more attention
from both the research community and the industry.
LIKE SO MANY OTHERS , THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN BECAUSE WE COULDN ’ T FIND ONE LIKE IT . We
needed something to hand to all of those people who have come to us asking for “a good
book to read on RFID.” When we looked for candidates we found some great books, but
most were aimed at electrical engineers or top-level managers, with very little for those of
us who are in between. This book is for developers, system and software architects, and
project managers, as well as students and professionals in all of the industries impacted by
Radio FREQUENCY Identification (RFID) who want to understand how this technology
works. As the title suggests, this book is about RFID in general and not just the most
recent developments; however, because so much is going on in the area of RFID for the
supply chain and especially the Electronic Product Code (EPC), we have devoted consider-
able space to these topics. Regardless of the type of RFID work you may be doing, we
think you will find something useful here.
Radio FREQUENCY identification (RFID) is a type of automatic identification systems
which has gained popularity in recent years for being fast and reliable in keeping
track of the individual objects. In RFID systems, contactless object identification
is achieved using radio signals without the need for physical contact as the case
with other existing identification technologies such as barcodes. Therefore, a huge
number of items can be identified in a short amount of time with high reliability
and low cost which makes the RFID technology very attractive for a wide range of
applications such as supply chain management, e-health, monitoring humans, pets,
animals, and many other objects, toll control, and electrical tagging. Furthermore,
RFID technology eliminates the human error and reduces the total cost of the
products.
Radio FREQUENCY identification (RFID) is gaining in popularity, especially
as we find ourselves in this communications age and headed towards a
ubiquitous computing world. Automatic identification systems become
an important aspect not just in today’s technology but also as part of our
daily life. We need RFID in our cars, transportation systems, access
points, and even simple transactions; we also acknowledge the need for
RFID in our logistics systems, healthcare, and tracking and locating
applications.
Radio FREQUENCY identification (RFID) and Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are
the two key wireless technologies that have diversified applications in the present
and the upcoming systems in this area. RFID is a wireless automated recognition
technology which is primarily used to recognize objects or to follow their posi-
tion without providing any sign about the physical form of the substance. On the
other hand, WSN not only offers information about the state of the substance
and environment but also enables multi-hop wireless communications.
We are in the era of ubiquitous computing in which the use and development of Radio FREQUENCY Iden-
tification (RFID) is becoming more widespread. RFID systems have three main components: readers,
tags, and database. An RFID tag is composed of a small microchip, limited logical functionality, and an
antenna. Most common tags are passive and harvest energy from a nearby RFID reader. This energy is
used both to energize the chip and send the answer back to the reader request. The tag provides a unique
identifier (or an anonymized version of that), which allows the unequivocal identification of the tag
holder (i.e. person, animal, or items).
The purpose of this book is to present detailed fundamental information on a
global positioning system (GPS) receiver. Although GPS receivers are popu-
larly used in every-day life, their operation principles cannot be easily found
in one book. Most other types of receivers process the input signals to obtain
the necessary information easily, such as in amplitude modulation (AM) and
FREQUENCY modulation (FM) radios. In a GPS receiver the signal is processed
to obtain the required information, which in turn is used to calculate the user
position. Therefore, at least two areas of discipline, receiver technology and
navigation scheme, are employed in a GPS receiver. This book covers both
areas.
Control Systems Engineering is an exciting and challenging field and is a
multidisciplinary subject. This book is designed and organized around the concepts of control
systems engineering using MATLAB, as they have been developed in the FREQUENCY and time
domain for an introductory undergraduate or graduate course in control systems for engineer-
ing students of all disciplines.
