Implementation of Application Layer Protocol for an Active RFID System

The emerging technology of active RFID tags has strong potential in the areas of real time health monitoring, sorting of cargo, and large scale inventory management because of their longer communication range and larger data storage capacity. The market of active RFID is growing very rapidly and therefore there has been an increase in the number of companies engaging in this field. But very often it is found that the products available in the market are not always suited to the application at hand. To overcome this problem, off the shelf active RFID products which were reconfigurable and followed a standard PHY and MAC layer protocol were used for this work. By reprogramming the application layer protocol of the RFID hardware, these devices were made suitable for the desired application. This also allowed the RFID tags to extend their functionality by interfacing extra modules with themselves. The work presented in this thesis describes the way in which the microcontroller on board the active RFID tags and readers can be programmed so that the functionality of the RFID hardware can be changed as per requirements. It also shows that extra modules can be added to the tag by successfully interfacing an accelerometer module with the tag.