Chipless RFID Sensor for High Voltage Condition Monitoring

A novel approach for non-invasive radiometric Partial Discharge (PD) detection and localization of faulty power apparatuses in switchyards using Chipless Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based sensor is presented. The sensor integrates temperature sensing together with PD detection to assist on-line automated condition monitoring of high voltage equipment. The sensor is a multi-resonator based passive circuit with two antennas for reception of PD signal from the source and transmission of the captured PD to the base station. The sensor captures PD signal, processes it with designated spectral signatures as identification data bits, incorporates temperature information, and retransmits the data with PD signals to the base station. Analyzing the PD signal in the base station, both the PD levels and temperature of a particular faulty source can be retrieved. The prototype sensor was designed, fabricated, and tested for performance analysis. Results verify that the sensor is capable of identifying different sources at the events of PD. The proposed low cost passive RFID based PD sensor has a major advantage over existing condition monitoring techniques due to its scalability to large substations for mass deployment.

Passive UHF RFID Technology Applied to Automatic Vehicle Identification

In this chapter, propagation channel aspects in current passive UHF RFID systems applied for automatic vehicular identification (AVI) are presented, considering the antennas design for passive UHF RFID tag and some problems relative to the electromagnetic compatibility. These issues are focused on RFID link, reader-tag-reader, and the channel modelling that is supported with measurements, and reader-reader interference problems are analysed.

Security Risks/Vulnerability in a RFID System and Possible Defenses

Remote technologies are changing our way of life. The radio frequency identification (RFID) system is a new technology which uses the open air to transmit information. This information transmission needs to be protected to provide user safety and privacy. Business will look for a system that has fraud resilience to prevent the misuse of information to take dishonest advantage. The business and the user need to be assured that the transmitted information has no content which is capable of undertaking malicious activities. Public awareness of RFID security will help users and organizations to understand the need for security protection. Publishing a security guideline from the regulating body and monitoring implementation of that guideline in RFID systems will ensure that businesses and users are protected. This chapter explains the importance of security in a RFID system and will outline the protective measures. It also points out the research direction of RFID systems.

Exploring Value-Added Applications of Chipless RFID Systems to Enhance Wider Adoption

Radio-frequency identification technology (RFID) is a popular modern technology proven to deliver a range of value-added benefits to achieve system and operational efficiency, as well as cost-effectiveness. The operational characteristics of RFID outperform barcodes in many aspects. Despite its well-perceived benefits, a definite rationale for larger scale adoption is still not so promising. One of the key reasons is high implementation cost, especially the cost of tags for applications involving item-level tagging. This has resulted in the development of chipless RFID tags which cost much less than conventional chip-based tags. Despite the much lower tag cost, the uptake of chipless RFID system in the market is still not as widespread as predicted by RFID experts. This chapter explores the value-added applications of chipless RFID system to promote wider adoption. The chipless technology’s technical and operational characteristics, benefits, limitations and current uses will also be examined. The merit of this chapter is to contribute fresh propositions to the promising applications of chipless RFID to increase its adoption in the industries that are currently not (or less popular in) utilising it, such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and service sectors.

RFID Tag Anti-Collision Protocols

A tag collision problem (or missed reads) in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system happens when multiple tags respond to a reader simultaneously. At this time, the reader cannot differentiate these tags correctly. This problem is often seen whenever a large volume of RFID tags are read together in the same radio frequency field. Tag collisions will degrade identification efficiency, and this unreliable identification will compromise the usefulness of RFID system. This chapter introduces tag collision problem and discusses tag anti-collision protocols, including ALOHA-based protocol, Binary Tree (BT) protocol, and Query Tree (QT) protocol. To date, most tag anti-collision protocols are QT protocols. Thus, in this chapter, the authors briefly describe some elegant researches on QT protocols, and also introduce their recent research results on QT protocols.

The Evolution of Intelligent Classifiers into an Integrated Approach to Correct RFID Anomalies

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) refers to wireless technology that is used to seamlessly and automatically track various amounts of items around an environment. This technology has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of tasks such as shopping and inventory saving commercial organisations both time and money. Unfortunately, the wide scale adoption of RFID systems have been hindered due to issues such as false-negative and false-positive anomalies that lower the integrity of captured data. In this chapter, we propose the utilisation three highly intelligent classifiers, specifically a Bayesian Network, Neural Network and Non-Monotonic Reasoning, to handle missing, wrong and duplicate observations. After discovering the potential from using Bayesian Networks, Neural Networks and Non-Monotonic Reasoning to correct captured data, we decided to improve upon the original approach by combining the three methodologies into an integrated classifier. From our experimental evaluation, we have shown the high results obtained from cleaning both false-negative and false-positive anomalies using each of our concepts, and the potential it holds to enhance physical RFID systems.

Recent Advancements in Smart Sensors and Sensing Technology

The chapter presents the design and development of very low cost planar sensors and sensing systems for measuring fat contents in meat, leather quality assessment, food quality, and biomedical application such as cancer detection, agriculture, and RFID based detection systems. The sensors comprise planar passive microwave integrated circuits in the forms of microstrip meander lines, mesh and inter-digital capacitance. The sensors are excited with voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) and power supply units. A data acquisition system based on a microcontroller and an op-amp based interfacing circuits complete the sensing system. The results of various characteristics parameters of samples are presented and compared with the results from expensive conventional measurement set up. These low cost sensors bring benefits in the sensing technology with novel and accurate concepts.

Potential Impact of RFID-Based Tracing Systems on the Integrity of Pharmaceutical Products

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is going to play a crucial role as auto-identification technology in a wide range of applications such as healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, ticketing, et cetera. The use of electromagnetic waves to identify, trace, and track people or goods allows solving many problems related to auto-identification devices based on optical reading (i.e. bar code). Currently, high interest is concentrated on the use of Radio Frequency (RF) solutions in healthcare and pharmaceutical supply chain, in order to improve drugs flow transparency and patients’ safety. Unfortunately, there is a possibility that drug interaction with electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by RF devices, such as RFID readers, deteriorate the potency of bioactive compounds. This chapter proposes an experimental multidisciplinary approach to investigate potential alterations induced by EMFs on drug molecular structure and performance. To show the versatility of this approach, some experimental results obtained on two biological pharmaceuticals (peptide hormone-based) are discussed.

Near Field Authentication

Counterfeiting affects many different sectors of the world trade, including the pharmaceutical and the aerospace industries, and, therefore, its impact is not only of financial nature but can also have fatal consequences. This chapter introduces a new robust RFID system with enhanced hardware-enabled authentication and anti-counterfeiting capabilities. The system consists of two major components, namely the near-field certificates of authenticity (NF-CoAs), which complement typical RFID tags and serve as authenticity vouchers of the products they are attached to, and a microcontroller-enabled, low-power and low-cost reader. The high entropy and security of this framework stem from the unique, conductive, and dielectric, physical structure of the certificate instances and the highly complex electromagnetic effects that take place when such a certificate is brought in the reactive near-field area of the reader’s antenna array. In particular, the reader’s main task is to accurately extract the 5 to 6 GHz near-field response (NF fingerprint) of the NF-CoAs. The characterization of the reader’s components, with an emphasis on the accuracy achieved, is provided. Rigorous performance analysis and security test results, including uniqueness among different instances, repeatability robustness for same instance and 2D to 3D projection attack resistance, are presented and verify the unique features of this technology. Rendering typical RFID tags physically unique and hard to near-exactly replicate by complementing them with NF-CoAs can prove a valuable tool against counterfeiting.

Design and Implementation of an Event-Based RFID Middleware

The downward trend in the cost of RFID technology is producing a strong impact on the industrial world that is using such powerful technology in order to rethink and optimize most of the existing business processes. In this sense, the chipless technology is playing a key role to facilitate the adoption of RFID in enterprises. All this implies the use of solutions that simplify the adoption of the continuously evolving RFID technology and allow keeping a high-level vision versus the specific technical details. In brief, it is mandatory to abstract the technological level and makes transparent the physical devices to the application level. The widespread use of the RFID technology also produces a large volume of data from many objects scattered everywhere, that have to be managed. In these complex scenarios, the RFID middleware represents an ideal solution that favors the technology integration, reducing costs for application development and introducing real benefits to the business processes. In this chapter, the authors describe the main features of our event-based RFID middleware and its powerful architecture. Their middleware is able to assure an effective process of technological abstraction, switching from a vision linked to the specific issues of interfacing devices (chipless tags, readers, sensor networks, GPS, WiFi, etc.) to the management of the event generated by each device. In brief, “event-based” means to integrate the management logic of different devices.