RFID 2009 - Special Issue of IEEE Proceedings - RFID - A Unique Radio Innovation for the 21st Century

Special Issue of IEEE Proceedings - RFID - A Unique Radio Innovation for the 21st Century.

Proceedings of the IEEE
(http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/pubs/proceedings/...) is organizing
a special issue of its publication entitled:"RFID - A Unique Radio
Innovation for the 21st Century".

Introduction and Background to the topic

Today RFID is finding its ways into industrial sectors ranging from retail
for tracking inventory to manufacturing for tracking product status to
airlines for finding lost baggage. While RFID technology has been around for
decades, it is only in the last few years that a rapid reduction in prices
of readers and tags, coupled with the advancement in enterprise I.T.
systems, along with demand from marquee customers such as Wal-Mart has
spurred the awareness, business value and deployment of RFID. By tracking
assets, supplies and personnel, enterprises are now beginning to experiment
with new business models to integrate RFID within their enterprise. While
the first generation of RFID technology involved reading one or a small
number of ID-only tags at a time with basic reader configurations with the
majority of the applications being for tracking inventory, now, the next
generation of applications are resulting in a far greater set of
sophisticated requirements on tags, readers, middleware, infrastructure and
I.T.

Examples of this new generation of applications include, retailers starting
to use RFID to automate shelf replacement to prevent dissatisfied customers,
or, hospitals using RFID to track critical devices that save patients' lives
and improve healthcare quality and process flow. In a related discipline,
pharmaceutical firms are using RFID to help prevent counterfeit drugs from
reaching pharmacies. Grocers are using intelligent sensor-laden RFID tags to
prevent food from spoiling. Such leading-edge innovations in the
applications of RFID are continually pushing the borders of RFID capability
and inducing research, innovation and scaled adoption, undergoing
specialization even within individual vertical industries and applications.

In response to a demand for such vertical applications of RFID within each
industry, standards, technologies, protocols, and middleware are being
innovated on appropriately. For example, while retail industry's supply
chain application has adopted EPC Gen 2 at ultra high frequency (900 MHz)
with passive tags, healthcare industry's asset tracking application has
refined active RFID operating at several different frequencies including 433
MHz and 2.4 GHz for finding patients. Increasingly specialized industry
specific frequencies, protocols and hardware are rapidly appearing in the
marketplace, thereby creating the impetus for research and the next
generation of applications causing a virtuous cycle of innovations and
applications.

While innovations continue to advance the field, the marketplace in
combination with the physical realities of RF-reading capability, eliminate
the unviable options, while furthering the viable ones. The need for a
special issue is therefore to bring together the research community with the
engineering and business community to form a picture of the state-of-the-art
in the field in terms of the current progress on research and innovations in
RFID, innovative applications, innovative methods of adoption and absorption
of RFID by the enterprises, innovative business and case studies, and a view
into what the future holds for this field.



Special Issue Overview

The special issue will focus on the research and technical innovations in
RFID hardware (readers/tags), middleware/software, applications, systems and
business cases in RFID. On the reader side, system on a chip is a new
paradigm that is allowing smaller, efficient and faster readers. Mobile
readers are being developed for newer applications such as healthcare and
pharmaceuticals where doctors can carry such readers on their belts.
Research innovations in software defined radios are also making their way
into reader designs that allow for reading of multiple
frequency/protocol/standard tags. RFID tags themselves have become highly
specialized ?V for example apparel tags and aerospace tags have little in
common. Research into tags involves a variety of topics as listed below.

Using readers and tags to develop applications typically requires the use of
a middleware program. Middleware typically allow scalability, homogeneity,
security in the enterprise, integratabilty with enterprise I.T., modularity
of system architecture, and other software benefits. Applications developed
with the use of middleware are rapidly becoming more common due to such
benefits that middleware??s provide. However, as we move to a more
ubiquitous RFID environment, where organizations in different industries
with their own specialized middleware want to communicate with each other,
newer middleware architectures may be required.

Eventually, enterprises require applications where RFID can provide a
benefit to their business. This implies that with all the innovations
happening around us, eventually it is the enterprise that will dictate which
technology it is able to absorb. For example, whether the Pharmaceutical
industry would adopt HP??s Memory spot tag (large memory tag) or Hitachi??s
new dust chip for their ePedigree mandate would depend on how these
technologies perform within the enterprise, the price/performance, the
needs, process constraints, cost of respective systems, standards used,
return on investment of the two respective systems, etc. Therefore bringing
in the systems and business issues into the up-front discussion at the
research stage itself could spur unique and different innovations ?V much
like the Wal-Mart mandate in 2005 spurred innovations in the EPC (Electronic
Product Code) protocol specifically for retail that are well beyond those
supported by the existing HF-tags operating on various ISO protocols.

Bringing these together, the topics for the forum include the following:

Topics include, but not limited to:



Reader Technology




Hardware design
Protocols
Antenna systems
System on a Chip (SOC)
Design of stationery, mobile, personal and handheld readers


Tag Technology




Intelligent tags
Security and encryption
Power efficiency
Antenna design
Protocols of communication
High memory tags
Tag-to-tag communications
Tag storage
Communication speed and tag data download rates
Low cost developments
Miniaturization and materials innovations
Active, semi-active, semi-passive and passive technologies
Nano and MEMS technologies for ultra-small, low-power tags


RFID Middleware technology




RFID Middleware Architecture
Security
Database integration
Speed issues in data movement
Integration with ERP, SCM and MRP
Web services
SOA (Services oriented architecture)
Enterprise I.T. architecture and middleware touch points


Technological and system issues




How it affects WLAN, WWAN, PAN, and other wireless networks
Infrastructure management
Impact on enterprise security
Wireless interference
Effect on physical products containing liquids and metal
RFID implants
RF modeling and simulation of reader-tag systems
System design, prototyping and scaling


Applications/Industries




Inventory Management
Asset Management
Retail
Manufacturing
Supply Chain
Pharmaceuticals
Healthcare/Medicine/Biotech/Biology
Aerospace / Airlines / Airport and baggage management
Automotive
Shipbuilding, Entertainment/Media
Financial / Mobile Payments
Security and access


Business Issues of RFID




ROI analysis at unit and enterprise levels
Revenue models in RFID services
Effect of RFID on process improvement for the enterprise
Impact on the CIO/I.T. office
Legal issues in RFID
Business versus consumer applications

In support of the special issue, UCLA-WINMEC is hosting a one-day forum on
Feb 24th, 2008 to encourage the community to come together, present their
research ideas, exchange information, and raise questions and discuss
research issues. We are also inviting potential authors to present their
research at this forum so that the authors can get a chance to evaluate
their own work in concert with what the community is doing and network with
the community, allow the Editorial Committee to give input to the potential
authors on their research, and subsequently for those papers that are
meritorious, recommend them to submit to the special issue of the journal.
The URL for this forum is
http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/rfid/AcademicForum/2008... (for further information
- email RFIDForum-AT-winmec.ucla.edu
ubmission> ). For the forum itself, an on-line proceedings will be created
with abstracts.

Authors Guide

Authors wishing to submit their papers should download the PDF file.
<http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/IEEEProceedings/view.pd...>

The URL where authors can submit their papers is
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pieee - the Manuscript Central. It is shared
by all working issues of Proceedings. Authors should begin by creating
accounts first. After receiving their password, they should go to the
"author center" and follow step-by-step instruction to submit a new
manuscript. Authors should indicate the special issue on RFID.

Important Dates (2008 - 2009)




February 24, 09

RFID event in UCLA <http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/rfid/AcademicForum/2009...>


March 15, 09

Paper submission deadline


April 30, 09

Review completed. Review comments and decisions sent to authors.


May 31, 09

Authors accepted or conditionally accepted - return reviewed papers to
associate editors with appropriate changes.


June 20, 09

Final List of papers decided for special issue


June 30, 09

Final acceptance and list of papers sent to IEEE


July 15, 09

All papers production ready to IEEE by authors.


Yours sincerely
Guest Editorial Team


Rajit Gadh (Chief Editor)
George Roussos (Associate Editor)
Katina Michael (Associate Editor)
George Huang (Associate Editor)
Shiv Prabhu (Associate Editor)
Peter Chu (Associate Editor)