Five major issues that have a significant impact on the development of RFID technology

    Standardization of RFID Technology

    The standardization of RFID began as early as 1995, when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) organized a joint technical committee to carry out this work. The series of RFID technical standards issued by ISO/IEC can be mainly divided into four categories: technical standards, data structure standards, equipment performance standards and application standards, and also include some specifications. From the content of the RFID technical standards formulated by ISO/IEC, it is based on the basic technical standards and data structure standards such as RFID encoding, air interface protocol, reader-writer protocol, etc., and defines specific performance requirements such as usage conditions, label size, label pasting position, data content format, and frequency band. According to the application field, application standards are formulated in other functions including data integrity and manual identification. The greatest significance of the RFID technical standards formulated by ISO/IEC lies in their universality. It provides a basic framework that takes into account the characteristics of different application fields on the principle of ensuring interoperability and interoperability, and meets the specific requirements of each application field.

    EPCGlobal is the world's second largest RFID standardization organization established by the Uniform Code Council (UCC) and the International Article Numbering Association (EAN). The center has jointly formulated the EPCGlobal technical standards with many corporate members. The focus of this standard is on the data carrier and content of the "Internet of Things" automatic identification infrastructure and identification, and on the basis of open technology and computer interconnection, it realizes the exchange and sharing of commodity information and solves transparency and tracking for the logistics supply chain. EPCGlobal is committed to establishing a standardized service network for global electronic tag users, and has become the de facto largest standard in the industry and has been widely used. At present, EPCGlobal has also submitted some of its own technical standards to ISO in the hope of becoming international standards, so as to make its own technical standard system more competitive.

    The world's third largest RFID technology standard was drafted by the Ubiquitous Center, which was established under the leadership of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan. Its technical alliance members are mainly Japanese manufacturers. The Ubiquitous Center organization and its members rejected the EPCGlobal technical standard. The RFID-related standards formulated by the organization also built a complete standard system with its own ucode encoding system, maintaining independence without losing compatibility. The focus of this system is more on the security performance of the network and application system.

    In addition to these three major RFID technology standard organizations, there are also AIM-global, the Global Automatic Identification Organization, and the third world standards organization IP-X to jointly promote the future Internet of Things technology system.

    Cost of electronic tags

    The cost of electronic tags has an extremely important impact on the promotion of RFID technology. Once low-priced electronic tags are available, they can be quickly promoted and applied. The electronic tags used in RFID systems are divided into active electronic tags (i.e. active electronic tags) and passive electronic tags (i.e. passive electronic tags). Active electronic tags are generally equipped with batteries as power sources, and the stored data content is large, so they contain more information to achieve more functions and the spatial range of identification is relatively large; the disadvantages are that they are large in size, high in price, and the battery life is determined by the power consumption of the tag. Passive electronic tags are small in size, low in cost, and easy to use, but have limited functions, contain less information, and have a shorter identification distance. Restricted by cost factors, most of the electronic tags currently used are passive passive electronic tags. There are many factors that affect the price of electronic tags, but the most important ones are materials and electronic components. The size and power consumption of electronic tags are also important factors affecting the price. Generally speaking, electronic tags with the same technical system and good compatibility can often reduce the price of a single electronic tag due to large batches.

    Transmitted data interference

    RFID technology uses multiple frequency bands to achieve data communication, complete the identification of electronic tags and the reading and writing of data. Because it uses a non-contact communication method, uses electromagnetic waves as the transmission medium and uses free space as the transmission channel, it generally uses the inductive coupling principle or the backscattering working principle. The specific frequency band and the principle of application are determined according to the application requirements and application fields. When electromagnetic waves propagate in space, the existence of reflection, refraction, scattering and absorption causes loss and signal attenuation, and the existence of multipath effect causes delay. In addition, both the indoor and outdoor space environments have great randomness, making it difficult to analyze the interference of data transmission in a fixed condition model. In addition, due to the openness of space, the various electromagnetic wave signals that actually exist also cause various interferences to the space transmission channel. In the RFID system, due to the large number of tags, after the reader sends a signal, the response signals from different tags also interfere with each other. Even when multiple readers are used, there is interference between readers. In theory, the larger the RFID system, the more complex and prominent the interference problem itself. For these reasons, various fault phenomena such as missed reading and unrecognizable will eventually occur during the transmission process of data reading and writing.

    Data collision

    In many RFID system applications, it is often necessary to read and write data on dozens or even hundreds of tags in a very short time segment (seconds). Signal transmission overlaps in the time domain, resulting in data collision problems. The data collision problem is essentially a channel sharing problem. In the channel sharing problem, four methods are generally used to solve it: time division multiple access (TDMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), space division multiple access (SDMA), and code division multiple access (CDMA). However, in RFID systems, due to power consumption and other factors, FDMA, SDMA, and CDMA are not applicable. At present, the widely used anti-collision algorithm based on the TDMA method is to solve the data collision problem: one is a deterministic algorithm based on binary numbers, and the other is an uncertain algorithm based on ALOHA.

    Data Security

    RFID systems use a large number of electronic tags. In this environment, the company's business secrets may be leaked, and security threats mainly come from tag threats, network threats and data threats. The computing power, storage space and power supply of RFID tags are relatively limited. The cheaper the electronic tags, the weaker the computing power and the worse the protection against security threats. Due to the use of wireless communication, in the state where some media can penetrate, for communication channels of more than 50 meters, criminals can use technical means to steal tag information and launch attacks on electronic tags or readers that read electronic tag information in a covert manner to intercept information. For the electronic tags themselves, electronic tags with multiple read and write functions are relatively convenient to use, but there are also greater hidden dangers, and security protection strategies are particularly important; for wireless communication channels, they are prone to the risk of illegal interception of communication data; for network connections, they are prone to various attacks from the Internet. In terms of data security, RFID systems should ensure confidentiality, data integrity, authenticity of anti-spoofing and privacy of communication information.