Survey of RFID and Its Application to International Ocean/Air Container Tracking

Minoru KATAYAMA  Hiroshi NAKADA  Hitoshi HAYASHI  Masashi SHIMIZU 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications  Vol.E95-B  No.3  pp.773-793
Publication Date: 2012/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: SURVEY PAPER
Category: INVITED
Keyword: 
RFID,  ubiquitous,  sensor,  passive,  active,  positioning,  container,  tracking, 

Full Text: FreePDF(7.2MB)

Summary: 
“Internet of Things” (IoT) requires information to be collected from “anything”, “anytime”, and “anywhere”. In order to achieve this, wireless devices are required that have (1) automatic data acquisition capability, (2) small size, (3) long life, and (4) long range communication capability. One way to meet these requirements is to adopt active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. Active RFID is more advantageous than passive RFID and enables higher data reading performance over longer distances. This paper surveys active RFID systems, the services they currently promise to provide, technical problems common to these services, and the direction in which research should head in the future. It also reports the results of EPCglobal (EPC: Electronic Product Code) pilot tests conducted on global logistics for tracking ocean/air container transportation using active RFID systems for which we developed several new types of active RFID tags. The test results confirm that our active RFID tags have sufficient capability and low power consumption to well support ocean/air transportation and logistics service.