Data Management Issues in RFID Applications

Radio Frequency Identification

Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has moved from obscurity into mainstream applications that help speed the handling of manufactured goods and materials. RFID tags are broadly classified as active and passive tags. The comparison between Active tag and passive tag is depicted in Table 1. Active tag has internal power source and the written data on the tag can be modified or rewritten. It is of high cost and less life duration when compared to the passive tag. Passive tag has its own demand because of its long life duration and less cost. It doesn’t have an internal power source and it depends upon the reader to get energized. It is smaller and lighter than active tags but has a shorter communication range and requires a high powered reader. Tag with passive type is composed of three parts: comprises an antenna, part of semiconductor chip attached to the antenna, and also has some form of encapsulation. The tag comes in a variety of capabilities which includes read-only and read-write. (Chatterjee & Timande, 2012) says the tag reader is responsible for powering and communicating with a tag. The RFID Reader is used to interrogate the zone to discover tags within proximity of the reader range (Chen, 2006). Once the tag is discovered, captures its identification along with the reader’s ID and the timestamp of the observation are also recorded. All this information is then passed through the Middleware where initial filtration is done to avoid data anomalies being recorded. Then finally, collected information will then be processed and stored within a database ready to be queried for future analysis.