Chapter10.Standards

Chapter 10. Standards

A discussion of RFID technology is not complete without the standards from different standards bodies and organizations aimed at resolving and standardizing different aspects of the technology. Why should you be concerned about standards? For the following good reasons:

• Design and implementation of a robust, well thought-out working system. Instead of spending resources on crafting a proprietary system from scratch, which might be prone to errors and deficiencies, the appropriate standard might specify a solution that has undergone several iterations and improvements, which will enable you to produce a solution that is well-defined, robust, and tried and tested in real-world implementations.

• Design and implementation of an open system. This is another huge benefit of using standards. The standard can provide strict specifications for solution components that vendors and integrators provide off the shelf, and thus you avoid any lengthy development effort and vendor lock-in.

• Design and implement a compatible system. Another important benefit of using standards is that the resulting solution is compatible with a wide array of related systems. Therefore, you will require fewer resources and less effort to integrate this solution with other systems.

You are strongly advised to locate a standard or specification that matches your application requirements as a first step when designing and implementing a solution, before making any effort at all in building a proprietary solution. What happens if the application in hand is trivial or such a matching standard or specification does not exist? First, if the solution is trivial or throwaway (for example, a quick and dirty proof-of-concept type application), not using a standard could be justified if this solution is not going to be iterated to arrive at a deployable solution. Second, you can adopt a related existing standard; for example, you can apply the EPCglobal specification (described later in this chapter) in almost any passive UHF RFID application. In the rare case that you can find no kind of standard to follow, you can still explore certain areas (such as tag types [frequency dependent] to use, how to attach RFID tags to items, and so on). You can still learn valuable lessons (instead of giving up completely) regardless of whether a standard is available.

Many RFID standards are available from many different organizations around the world. Descriptions of existing RFID standards could easily fill a book. Because of the changing nature of the standards, however, a static description in such a book would be outdated even before publication. Therefore, this book attempts a different approach. This chapter discusses RFID standards that are in existence today, but makes no claim that the standards covered here are exhaustive. For example, new standards might be adopted subsequent to this writing. Similarly, some standard might disappear totally or have parts withdrawn. If you are interested in a certain standard and want to explore it in detail, procure a copy of the actual specification by contacting the appropriate standards body. You can find contact information for these standards bodies at the end of this chapter. That said, this chapter does describe some select standards. However, these are not a substitute for the actual standards specifications. As stated previously, standards change and evolve over time; therefore, some of the description provided at the time of writing might have changed by the time of reading. The following major standards organizations, in no particular order, have either produced standards related to some aspect of RFID or have provided related regulatory functions:

• ANSI (American National Standards Institute)

• AIAG (Automotive Industry Action Group)

• EAN.UCC (European Article Numbering Association International, Uniform Code Council)

• EPCglobal

• ISO (International Organization for Standardization)

• CEN (Comité Européen Normalisation (European Committee for Standardization))

• ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute)

• ERO (European Radiocommunications Office)

• UPU (Universal Postal Union)

• ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials)

This is not an exhaustive list. The standards that appear in this chapter emanate from a subset of the preceding standards bodies. In addition, standards/mandates from government are discussed.

NOTE

If a standard is composed of multiple parts and information on some of the parts is not available at this time, the standard is assumed to consist of the remaining parts.