Integrating RFID Technology in Internet Applications

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) which is a mature identification and tracking technology recently is picking up its momentum with the emergency of a highly hyped "Internet of Things" (IOT). The ultimate goal of IOT is to let human and objects seamlessly talk to each other via the Internet. It finds great impacts on our lifestyles in various applications such as supply chain management, access control security, mobile health-care, etc. In response to this technology trend and market demands, a high level infrastructure called EPC (Electronic Product Code) network with Object Naming Service has been proposed that rides on the future IPv6 Internet. In order to enable the operation of EPC network, auxiliary mechanisms such as privacy and security protection, context-aware capabilities, middleware and interoperable data semantics are needed. In this paper we propose a prototype of wireless communication system incorporated with Internet capability, namely Internet RFID. In particular, this paper shows the preliminary design, implementation and testing of the Internet RFID prototype in a client-server environment. As an experiment, we implemented a typical RFID system with the additional feature of distance finding that can track and monitor access control, and at the same time a database located remotely in a Web Server is updated. Users can query the Web database server in real-time about the location of the client. The hardware module consists mainly of the construction of two micro-controller systems: one for the user card and the other one for the station transceiver controller. Recommendations are provided at the end of the paper for future development.