| Standards are critical in RFID. Be it
payment systems or tracking goods in open supply chains. A great deal of
work has been going on to develop standards for different RFID frequencies
and applications.
RFID standards deal with the following:-
- Air Interface Protocol - The
way tags and readers communicate
- Data Content - Organizing of
data
- Conformance - Tests that
products meet the standard
- Applications - How applications
are used
The way the world has gone about developing
the standards is a bit complex. There are two major and somewhat conflicting
organizations into the business - ISO and Auto-ID Centre (now handled by EPC
Global). Without going too much into the conflict, we'll review the
standards proposed by both these organizations.
Tags are required to be disposable
(manufacturer may not get the tags back from the retailer to reuse it).
Hence, the primary mission for any standard developer is to make the tags
low cost. It should operate in UHF, as only UHF delivers read range needed
for supply chain applications. And since the goods are needed to be tracked
as they move across the globe, the standards must be open and globally
accepted. There should also be an accompanying network architecture, which
would enable anyone to look up information associated with a serial number
stored on a tag. The network too needs to be based on open standards.
EPC standards for tags are the class 0 and
class 1 tags:
- Class 1: a simple, passive,
read-only backscatter tag with one-time, field-programmable non-volatile
memory.
- Class 0: read-only tag that was
programmed at the time the microchip was made
Class 1 and Class 0 have a couple of
shortcomings, in addition to the fact that they are not interoperable. One
issue is that they are incompatible with ISO standards. The new EPC standard
– Gen2 is designed to be fast tracked with ISO standards but for some
disagreements over the 8 bit Application Family Identifier (AFI).
ISO has developed RFID standards for
automatic identification and item management. This standard, known as the
ISO 18000 series, covers the air interface protocol for systems likely to be
used to track goods in the supply chain. They cover the major frequencies
used in RFID systems around the world.
The seven parts are:
- 18000–1: Generic parameters for air
interfaces for globally accepted frequencies
- 18000–2: Air interface for 135 KHz
- 18000–3: Air interface for 13.56 MHz
- 18000–4: Air interface for 2.45 GHz
- 18000–5: Air interface for 5.8 GHz
- 18000–6: Air interface for 860 MHz to
930 MHz
- 18000–7: Air interface at 433.92 MHz
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