Integration of RFID readers into wireless mobile telecommunication networks

Over the last few years significant work has been done in defining interfaces, standards, reader protocols and middleware platforms for RFID (radio frequency identification) systems. However, current solutions are mainly dedicated to environments where readers or interrogators are located in the same premises that host the middleware and database servers, thus leaving unattended an accurate analysis of how efficiently to integrate them into wireless mobile telecommunication networks. This is particularly critical in cases where readers need to be placed in geographically distant and mobile locations, and where bandwidth limitations of the underlying public wireless networks might restrict the deployment of certain RFID applications. This paper aims at partially filling this gap by first proposing an approximate and heuristic theoretical model for the effects of the traffic generated by a mobile RFID reader upon the communication links to be used, and then by analyzing the possibilities of integrating readers into known mobile telecommunication technologies. Based on the proposed approximation, basic relationships between different RFID parameters such as reader complexity, tag reading rate and the total utilized bandwidth are here found and discussed. Although the models and assumptions used here still need to be validated and/or adjusted to real system scenarios, it is expected that this work will bring further research on the interesting problem of designing RFID systems, where not only variables from different layers of the OSI (open system interconnection) model interact with each other, but many others coming from privacy, security, business and regulatory fields must also be addressed.