RFID based attendance system

Most educational institutions' administrators are concerned about student irregular attendance. Truancies can affect student overall academic performance. The conventional method of taking attendance by calling names or signing on paper is very time consuming and insecure, hence inefficient. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based attendance system is one of the solutions to address this problem. This system can be used to take attendance for student in school, college, and university. It also can be used to take attendance for workers in working places. Its ability to uniquely identify each person based on their RFID tag type of ID card make the process of taking the attendance easier, faster and secure as compared to conventional method. Students or workers only need to place their ID card on the reader and their attendance will be taken immediately. With real time clock capability of the system, attendance taken will be more accurate since the time for the attendance taken will be recorded. The system can be connected to the computer through RS232 or Universal Serial Bus (USB) port and store the attendance taken inside database. An alternative way of viewing the recorded attendance is by using HyperTerminal software. A prototype of the system has been successfully fabricated.

I. INTRODUCTION

Radio frequency identification (RFID) refers to the use of radio frequency wave to identify and track the tag implanted into an object or a living thing [1]–[3]. It is a wireless mean of communication that use electromagnetic and electrostatic coupling in radio frequency portion of the spectrum to communicate between reader and tag through a variety of modulation and encoding scheme [4]. Modulation refers to the variation in the amplitude, frequency or phase of a high frequency carrier signal to convey information. Encoding is a process of converting information from one format to another. RFID system usually consists of RFID reader and tag. It is very useful because it can uniquely identify a person or a product based on the tag incorporated. It can be done quickly and this usually takes less than a second.