Distributed Design of RFID Network for Large-Scale RFID Deployment

It is no doubt that RFID technology is of very widespread applications. With RFID deployment scales-up, its application becomes more and more network-centric. The design of RFID network hence plays a critical role for successfully deploying large-scale applications. This is especially true when the tagged object is on item-level. This paper discusses issues that should be considered in design of RFID network; analyzes the potential impacts of different RFID network design on the existing enterprise network; presents a distributed design of RFID network for large-scale deployment. The paper also quantifies packet size of RFID data based on EPC serialized number; analyzes bandwidth requirement of RFID traffic for the diversified number of readers to illustrate the necessity of the distributed design, which authors believe are helpful for the earlier adopters of RFID technology, and may ignite more researchers and pioneering practitioners involving R&D along this direction. As a case study, the paper presents a cost-effective, sound and efficient RFID network design for retail.