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Miodrag Bolic2*
mbolic@uottawa.ca
Jing Wang2
jwang226@uottawa.ca
Xin Qian2,3
lanyi923@163.com
1. Introduction
Even though Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
systems can rapidly collect information about items, they
cannot acquire dynamic status information of items, such
as temperature, humidity, and acceleration and so on. On
the other hand, sensor systems are capable of collecting
all kinds of dynamic status information of items and fill
the gap by RFID systems. In order to collect item data
rapidly and monitor the environment status around the
items, it is very important to integrate RFID with sensors.
We refer to the device that integrates RFID tag and
sensors, as SRFID (sensing RFID) tag. However,
designers are confronted with the several challenges
when they attempt to integrate sensors into an RFID tag,
especially when the SRFID tags are used in large scale or
open-loop systems.
The first challenge is the non-smart sensors
description. In future SRFID tags, the number and type
of sensors can be different according to specific
application requirements. In addition, models and
parameters of sensors from different manufacturers differ
among one another even if these sensors are of the same
type. The following problems are recognized when these
diverse sensors in the SRFID tags are identified and
configured by off-the-shelf readers in a standard way: 1)
unique differentiation of sensors in a SRFID tag by the
reader; 2) automatic recognition of types and basic
sampling data.
In this paper, we will focus on sensor
self-description, sensor-related data storage management
and operational mechanism of sensor sampling for
sensors integrated with an active RFID tag. This study is
limited to self-description of a sensor and it does not
consider features of Plug and Play (PnP).
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 gives an overview of integration of RFID and
sensors that is relevant to our work. Section 3 presents
sensor self-description design with virtual TEDS. Section
4 presents sensor-related data storage approach in the
SRFID tag. Section 5 discusses the operational
mechanism of SRFID system. Section 6 introduces the
implementation and experiment with the SRFID system.
Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 7.
2. Related Work
This section covers two aspects of related work: a
sensors description and a management method of
sensor-related data in the sensor node.
2.1 Sensors Description
Sensors description is about sensors characteristic
parameters and it involves sensors plug and play
technology. There are two main technologies for device
PnP: Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and Java
Intelligent Network Infrastructure (Jini) [1]. The UPnP
description for a device is expressed in XML and
includes vendor-specific manufacturer information like
the model name and number, serial number,
IEEE 1451
Virtual TEDS
Legacy Sensor
Analog Signal
Sensor
Analog Signal
Sensor
Sensor
Digital Signal
TEDS
TEDS
(EEPROM)
(EEPROM)
Digital
WWW
WWW
TEDS
Database
Temperature
Sensor
Transceiver
Humidity
Sensor
Micro Control Unit
Accelerometer
Sensor
Radiation
Sensor
Non-Smart
Sensors
Host
Computer
Application
Reader
EEPROM
Decoded Sensor
Information
Mfgr ID:
41
Model:
710LP
Serial Num: 0012113
Physical typeAcceleration
Range:
50g
TEDS Software
In the Reader
Templates
ID TEDS
Charact TEDS
Sampling Data Block1
TEDS type
Physical sensor type
Logical Sensor Map
Type Extended
MODEL-NUMBER
VERSION-LETTER
VERSION-NUMBER
SERIAL-NUMBER
14 bits (17-16381)
15bits (0-32,767)
5-bits char(A-Z)
6bits (0-63)
24bits (0-16777215)
NAME
LENGTH
FIELD
NAME
LENGTH
1
2
TEDS-TYPE
PHYSICAL-SENSOR-TYPE
3 bits
7 bits
7
8
SCALE-FACTOR-EXPONENT
SCALE-OFFSET-SIGNIFICAND
6 bits
11 bits
3
4
TYPE-EXTENDED
LOGICAL-SENSOR-MAP
5 bits
16 bits
9
10
SCALE-OFFSET-EXPONENT
DATA-PRECISION
6 bits
4 bits
5
6
DATA-TRANSFER-FORMAT
SCALE-FACTOR-SIGNIFICAND
3 bits
11 bits
11
12
SENSOR-CONFIGURATION
USE-FOR-FUTURE
1 bit
7 bits
NAME
LENGTH
NOTE
1
2
CONFIGURATION-TIME
SAMPLING-BEGIN-TIME
32 bits
32 bits
UTC timestamp
UTC timestamp
3
4
INTERVAL-OF-SAMPLING
ALARM-SETING
16 bits
8 bits
5
6
UPPER-ALARM-THRESHOLD
LOWER-ALARM-THRESHOLD
32 bits
32 bits
Host
Computer
CHARACTER
CONFIG
DATA
Temperature
Sensor
Humidity
Sensor
Reader
Accelerometer
Sensor
Radiation
Sensor
SRFID Tag
Table
2,
field
SENSOR
SAMPLING
CONFIGURATION is totally 152 bits as shown in Table
3, and field SENSING DATA ADDRESS is 16 bits. The
field SENSING DATA ADDRESS only stores the
address that points to the sensor-sampling data in the
EEPROM of the tag.
Data Code
Mapping
Parsed Sensors
Parameters
Parsing Sensor
sampling data
Sensor ID TEDS
Sensor
Characteristic TEDS
Sensor sampling
configuration
Sensor sampling
data
Temperature
Sensor
Humidity
Sensor
Accelerometer
Sensor
And more
Radiation
Sensor
Reader
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
7. Conclusion
Integration of sensors into RFID system is not only
a trend, but also a need nowadays. However, there are
several challenging problems related to integration of
sensors and RFID tags including parameters description
of a non-smart sensor, management of sensor-related
data and operational mechanism of sensor sampling. This
paper focuses on addressing these problems in SRFID
system. It proposes virtual TEDS technology to describe
parameters of non-smart sensors in the tag, puts forward
the method with the data table to manage the
sensor-related data effectively, and analyzes the
operational mechanism of sensor sampling. Finally,
validity of these ideas is verified in an experiment that
deals with the container supply chain. In the future,
sensor plug and play technology and semantic sensor
network will be studied. If the function of sensor
Plug-and-Play is implemented completely, the TEDS
data will be constructed automatically by the SRFID tag
without any intervention when new smart sensors are
plugged into an existing SRFID tag.
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
Acknowledgments
This paper is a partial work of Tianjin Key
Technology R&D Program No. 09ZCKFGX03700
funded by Tianjin Municipal Science and Technology
Commission, China.
[12]
[13]
Conflict of Interest
The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of
interests regarding the publication of this article.
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