Integration of RFID into Wireless Sensor Networks: Architectures, Opportunities and Challenging Problems

Lei Zhang and Zhi Wang

National Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Institute of Industry Process Control, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, P.R.China {zhanglei, wangzhi}@iipc.zju.edu.cn Abstract
The vision of pervasive computing is based on the idea that future computers will merge with their environment. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are two important components of pervasive computing, since both technologies can be used for coupling the physical and the virtual world. However, RFID and WSN almost are under development in parallel method, few integration schemes and related opportunities are investigated in detail. Through deep analysis of RFID and WSN, three forms of new system architecture that combines the two technologies are proposed and its feasibility, technical challenges are discussed thoroughly. kind of sensor, it certainly can be integrated to WSNs. However, RFID and WSN are almost under development in parallel method, few integration schemes and its related opportunities are investigated in detail. In an effort to bridge the gap between industry and academic focuses, we propose new network architectures integrating both technologies to achieve an optimal goal. Through deep analysis of RFID and WSN, three forms of new system architecture are proposed. WSN nodes and RFID tags are mixed composing of heterogeneous network where tags and sensor nodes work separately. A more functional smart base station combining RFID readers and WSN base stations is needed to coordinate tags and sensor nodes working properly. Smart base stations will be a decisive factor to the whole system, of which the infrastructure is very complicated and costly. There is a trade-off between the complexity of the infrastructure and the device. The infrastructure can be simpler if complexity is moved to the devices. We then propose a distributed reduced functional sensor reader, which organize themselves and cooperate with each other in networks. The second integration increases the number of readers in networks and reduces the complexity of each reader. A smart active tag network architecture is also proposed in the paper. Instead of sending message to readers directly, message is transmitted between tags until it reaches the ultimate object. Sensed information is transmitted utilizing the network protocol of WSNs. Selection of the form of integration is usually be costbased and depends on the application. A nodes battery is not replaceable, so its energy is the most important system resource. While an RFID system where data is collected at one or several centralized points is not energy-efficient [3]. Energy efficiency has been a crucial problem when combining RFID and WSNs. The best method for conserving energy is to put as many nodes to sleep as possible. At the same time, however, the network must maintain its functionality through a connected subnetwork that lets the monitoring station communicate with any of the

1. Introduction
It is widely believed that the next revolution in computing technology will be that the widespread small wireless computing and communication devices will integrate seamlessly into daily life [1]. We can therefore expect in the near future lots of devices to grow by multiple orders of magnitude such as tags, sensors etc. They gather information about the current environment, which means sensing and processing information. Among technologies, RFID and WSN are two important components of this pervasive computing since both as technology can be used for coupling the physical and the virtual world in pervasive computing environments. It is possible for RFID to bridge the real and the virtual world, which results in a machine readable environment when tags are used at a large scale. RFID systems have been applied in a number of applications, such as asset tracking, telemetry-based remote monitoring, and real time supply chain management. Meanwhile WSN has been around mostly only as proofs of concept except for military applications [2], although it is considered as a major step towards pervasive computing. Considering RFID as a specific

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networks active nodes. Therefore ZigBee protocol is likely the best candidate as it satisfies reliable, low cost, low power consumption requirements. A theoretical calculation how long the expected battery life time lasts is also given in this paper. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a brief introduction to WSN, RFID and ZigBee. Heterogeneous network architecture mixed RFID reader and sensor base station is proposed in Section 3. Section 4 describes distributed reduced sensor reader architecture and its network, Section 5 describes smart active tag network. Comparison of three schemes and conclusion are given in section 6.

power consumption of a system. Transceivers currently used include the Infineon [6] or Chipcon [7] devices or similar radio modems are available from various manufacturers. Last important component of a sensor node is power source. Battery management is an important issue in WSNs since battery is irreplaceable.

Fig. 2. Functional diagram of a sensor node

2. Technical Backgrounds
2.1. Wireless Sensor Networks
A wireless sensor network is a system which is capable of self-configuring, self-networking, selfdiagnosing and self-healing, which have made sensor networks a very attractive solution for a wide range of environmental monitoring, distributed surveillance, healthcare and control applications [1].

The sensor nodes usually send their data to a specific sink node or monitoring station for collection. If all the nodes communicated directly with the monitoring station, the communication load especially over long distanceswould quickly drain the networks power resources. Therefore, the sensors operate in a self-organized, decentralized manner that maintains the best connectivity as long as possible and communicates messages via multihop spreading [5].

2.2. Radio Frequency Identification

RFID is a method of remotely storing and retrieving data using devices called RFID tags/transponders. [3] RFID first appeared in tracking and access applications during the 1980s. These wireless systems allow for non-contact reading and are effective in manufacturing and other hostile environments where bar code labels could not survive [9]. As a cheap and mature technology, established for more than twenty years, it enables location- and context-aware applications. An RFID system includes five components [15]: (1) tags located on the object to be identified, (2) readers which may be a read or write/read device, (3) antennas that emit radio signals to activate the tag and read/write data to it, (4) a local control chamber sending reading/writing commands to all the readers as well as reading back tag information. Besides, a new component added to some systems is called signpost. Signposts activate only those tags within their immediate vicinity at 123 kHz, enabling precise identification of tagged items at specific locations. A tag is a mini little label conserving fixed-format data, which includes antenna and wireless communication IC as big as sesame. Attached into tagged items, RFID tags are particular identifiers announcing its presence to a reader. The RFID reader consists of transmitting and receiving sections. It transmits a carrier signal, receives the backscattered signal from the tag, and performs

Fig. 1. Wireless sensor network

Sensor networks consist of tiny low-powered computing network nodes with extremely restricted computational, communication and battery capabilities. The typical hardware platform of a wireless sensor node will consist of sensor, microcontroller, and radio frequency transceiver and power source. Each node is equipped with a physical sensor for reading light, temperature, sound, pressure or other physical phenomena. The microcontroller manages the procedures that make the sensor node collaborate with the other nodes. When choosing a microcontroller power consumption, required chip size, computational power and on-chip memory are very important. A transceiver unit connects the node to the network. Choosing a low-power-consumption transceiver is crucial for a low-consumption system because current consumption of a transceiver takes up most of the

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data processing. All details of communication such as establishing communication, collision prevention, and authentication, are all dealt with by the reader itself. The reader also communicates with an external host computer. A basic block diagram of a typical RFID tag and reader is shown in Figure3.

Fig. 3(a). Functional block diagram of typical RFID

tag

Fig. 4 (b). Functional block diagram of typical RFID

reader RFID systems work strictly according to masterslave principle. All the behavior of readers and tags are controlled by application program. System program as master will send write/read instructions to readers, while readers as slavers only response to the commands from application program. To execute the instruction from application program, readers will establish communication with corresponding tags. Compared with readers are masters, tags only response the instructions from readers, and will never act anything without readers instruction.

Fig. 4. RFID operation principle An active RFID system particularly for long distance identification requires readers installed in a fixed position, but also has some special requirements about the direction of antennas, therefore, flexibility of system is limited greatly, and the cost of entire system is no longer cheap.

2.3. ZigBee Protocol

As in this heading, they should be Times 11-point boldface, initially capitalized, flush left, with one blank line before, and one after. 802.15.4/ZigBee is a new rising short-haul low-rate technical resolution for automatic system and remote control. IEEE 802.15.4 defines Physical Layer and MAC Layer (including encryption mechanism in data transmission). ZigBee Alliance takes charge in correlated standards and interoperability testing from Network Layer to Application Layer. Complete descriptions of the protocols used in ZigBee can be found in [11], [12]. ZigBee protocol is considered as the best configuration scheme for WSN applications in industry application field, as it satisfies reliable, low cost, low power consumption requirements for these applications. ZigBee has some characters as follows, which is extremely fit for WSNs where the range needing to coverage and the number of devices in the network are very large. z The flash memory requirement for a ZigBee device ranges from 4 to 32 KB depending on the devices complexity, the required stack features, and whether or not its a reduced function device (RFD) or full function device (FFD). This is about a quarter of Bluetooths requirements. z ZigBee is so low powered that a typical batterypowered node can wake up, check in, send data, and shut down in less than 30 ms. This leads to an extremely long battery life. For devices with a 30s check-in period or more, the batterys shelf life will expire before the battery capacity runs If a node is configured for use with a beacon frame and a guaranteed time slot. z Reliability of the whole network is guaranteed by Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS), a sophisticated MAC layer supporting CSMA-CA, optional acknowledgement, AES 128-bit security, clear channel assessment, link quality indication, and mesh network architecture, all of which have been demonstrated highly reliable in previous IEEE standards by practice. z Low cost. A ZigBee device includes a ZigBee IC that solids all of functions of PHY layer and MAC layer, which hook up to a low power consumption 8-bit MCU. The cost of a naked ZigBee IC plus the necessary discrete beats other options on physical size and cost. However, ZigBee has no comparability when it comes to data rate because it isnt designed for a high data duty cycle from each node. ZigBee is much less mature than proprietary spread-spectrum solutions. ZigBee might be a better option if you require the following: small size, cost sensitivity, low latency, low power, and interoperability.

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3. Integration of RFID Reader and WSN Base Station

One trend of the development of RFID is integrating it into network. RFID network is very mature now such as Real time locating System (RTLS), which implies us to integrating sensor nodes into RFID to get more environment information we need. A mix of tags and sensor nodes are deployed in detected area. Smart stations gather information from tags and sensor nodes then transmit it to local host PC or remote LAN. Here RFID and WSN information can be integrated in the base station, which will be more intelligent. For example, WSN data triggers RFID reader for certain unusual event. The new system will be composed of three classes of devices. The first class is that of wireless devices with no serious power constraints named as smart stations. The device will contain an RFID reader, a 32bit microprocessor for local data processing and a network connection. They are nearly identified with the wired devices but use wireless connections to the backbone network for more convenient deployment. The second and the third class are normal tags and sensor nodes.

4. Distributed Smart Node

As no network stack is embedded into the reader in a RFID system at present, the reader can only be operated passively and all of its behaviors are controlled by local control system. Its very big volume also makes it difficult to move around. Moreover, the position of antennas of an RFID reader must be computed carefully to cover all the tags in range and not to conflict with other antennas or readers. All of these disadvantages limit the applications of RFID. If functions of a reader are cut short, an RFID reader might get much smaller, less expensive and easy to deploy. We propose a new smart node containing less functional reader. For now there seems to be no counterpart in RFID systems for this device.

4.1. Smart node

The smart node contains three parts: sensing part which makes use of kinds of sensors to detect interested physical scenario, reading part which reads fewer tags comparing with a normal RFID reader, and radio transceiver which transporting sensed data. We give the schematic picture of smart nodes as Fig 6.

Fig.6. Schematic of smart node platform

Fig. 5. Heterogeneous network architecture

Limited resources and power challenges at smart stations dont exist here, which suggests the traditional Internet protocol architecture can be employed. This means that there is a multi-layer networking stack implemented in each smart station, that allows not only for some processing, but also for the routing of data and eventually even for reliable transport protocols such as TCP. 802.11b/Wi-Fi technology is a good platform for such heterogeneous network. In Physical layer, 802.11b/Wi-Fi uses the unlicensed 2.4 GHZ band and DSSS technique, and maximum data rate can reach to 11 Mbps. In MAC sub-layer, 802.11b/Wi-Fi uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme, which can improve the efficiency of network remarkably.

Smart nodes read fewer tags and can be deployed densely as self-organizing WSN. Smart nodes run autonomously and translate data information to the sink node. The gathered information is transmitted through multi-hops. As information of tags in the same area is similar, it can be compressed with simple and high effective data compressing methods in each smart node. Consequently, flexible communication protocol is necessary. Presently, ZigBee protocol is the best candidate for the proposed architecture for its features we describe in technical ground. ZigBee take much method to lower power consumption in physical lay and MAC layer. In the following we will make a theoretical calculation how long the expected battery lifetime would lasts. Energy constrains is an extremely crucial problem when smart nodes are wanted to be applied in industry for battery change is not taken into account.

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has a very high current consumption. Each transmitted byte is followed by a stop bit which implies that each Byte corresponds to 9 bits. The time it takes to send the information is therefore given by
60(8 + 1) bits 38.4 kbit/s = 14.06 ms

(2)

Fig. 7. Architecture of networked smart nodes

(reduced functional sensor readers)

4.2. Energy calculation

[13] Proposes a prototype on RFID and Sensor Networks similar to ours, however, it didnt take into account the power consuming. We consume here Mica2 [17] for controller platform and TAGSYS Medio S002 [14] for reader part, and utilize their parameters to calculate the battery life. Medio S002 supports a maximum data rate of 38.4 kbit/s. The supply voltage U is 4 to 6 V and the output power is 250 mw [14]. Here we suppose supply voltage is 6 V and data rate is 38.4 kbit/s. Of course the lifetime is depending on which types of batteries used. The high quality AA batteries have a capacity about 2200 mAh. If the reader works continuously, the battery lifetime will only be
2200 mAh*6V 250mw = 52.8h

Further the time it takes for the reader to respond to a command given is approximately 1 ms. In total 5 commands are sent to the reader when one tag is within range resulting in the total respond time equals 5 ms. Finally the time it takes to wake up the reader from shutdown mode is 10 ms, and during this time the RF field is not on resulting in a lower current consumption. The current consumption of the reader equals 115 mA while the RF field is on, and the consumption is 18 mA when the RF field is off. If we assume that the reader is instructed to read one tag every minute The average current during a minute is
(14.06 ms + 5 ms )*115 mA+ 10 ms * 18mA 60 * 1000 ms = 0.03953mA (3)

Current consumptions of the MICA2 platform in full operation and in sleep mode are given in [17]. If the microcontroller works with a duty-cycle of 1%, the average current of microcontroller is 0.016mA and of the transceiver is 0.092mA. A 1% duty-cycle would be realistic to use with the ZigBee protocol, tough the latency would be very long. The life time of the battery can be calculated as
2200 mAh 0.03953 mA + 0.092mA+0.016mA = 14912h=1.7 year (4 )

(1)

So its necessary to take every method to save energy. The expected battery life shall be a year or more, which puts hard constrains on the power consumption of smart nodes. To meet this requirement, the smart node has to go into sleep mode when it is idle. Medio S002 has a current consumption of 500 A when it is put in shutdown mode. The batteries will last shorter than six months while the RFID reader is put in shutdown mode. However it is lucky we can turn off the power of the RFID reader completely when the RFID reader is not used and thereby clear up the power consumption. From now on we assume that the RFID reader does not have any power consumption when it is not used. To be able to estimate the energy consumption of the RFID reader when it is operational we make some more assumptions. First we assume that when the reader is reading there will be one tag within range. From this it is able to estimate that the amount of data that is sent between the reader and the microcontroller is about 60 Bytes per read instruction. This figure is important because during this transmission the reader

4.3. Case of application

Highly integrated and inexpensive smart nodes network is much cheaper and more flexible compared with the first class of heterogeneous network. It can be applied into applications without strict real-time requirement. It will find a wide application in industry, such as maintenance and inventory security. As Fig 8 show, smart nodes with temperature sensors are deployed densely in the smart warehouse. Proper deployment algorithms shall be used to adopt as few as nodes to make all the tags in the range of readers. The maintenance of inventory can be identified by a smart node tracking system. An alarm could be triggered when an asset leaves a facility without authorization. And we may be able to learn that the temperature of someplace in the warehouse is much higher than usually and put out fire immediately before it comes out of control.

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802.15.4 standard provides symmetric key encryption and authentication to support end-to-end system security.

5.1. Case of application

Mini node network is specially fit for industrial security, remote condition-based maintenance systems that are switched on just once or twice per day. Complicated and expensive readers are no longer needed; instead, these mini nodes provide an inexpensive way to monitor the condition of products.

Fig.8. Smart warehouse

5. Smart Sensor Tags

Many active and semi-active tags have incorporated sensors into their design. Related studies can be found in [13]. The active tag is similar to the Mica mote [17]. But they are not exactly sensor network nodes because they communicate in centralized mode and cant cooperate with each other through formed ad-hoc network. Giving them microcontrollers, they will decide by themselves which and when data should be get. Therefore it is absolutely possible to substitute Mica nodes for active tags when the Mica nodes become much cheaper in the future. We call Mica nodes used in potential RFID applications as Mini nodes. The mini nodes can pass information from one to another until the data reaches the last transceiver, which communicates with a single reader. It effectively reduces the reader and wired network infrastructure. The network architecture of a complete system solution is shown as Fig.9.

Fig. 10. Fork lift operation dispatching in a factory

Fig. 9. Mini node network architecture (Smart active As the cost of devices is very low and data flow in the network is little, IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee standard is perfectly applicable to mini node network. ZigBee can help dumb tag chips which have a low transmission area get smarter for the features mentioned above. Though integrating the mini nodes into a complete system poses many difficulties with end-to-end security guaranties as they are based on highly application-specific software. Its lucky the IEEE
tags)

Fig 10 shows a fork lift operation dispatching in a factory. Rotating parts of dynamos are making in a production plant of a dynamos factory. After a rotating part is finished it needs to be taken away by a fork lift quickly. In most factories operator has to stop work in hand and search in the large plant to find the fork lift truck. The whole process sometimes requires more than half an hour, which is a great waste of time. In the future each finished rotating part of dynamos is attached with a mini node and the fork lift is equipped with a reader receiving information from mine nodes. When a rotating part is finished the tag can transmit its location between tags until its location information gets to the fork lift. Then the fork lift can go to move the rotating part automatically. We completed this experiment in our lab making use of Mica2 motes. The area of our lab is 11m * 9m. Robot carrying a Mica mote can get the information of every node in the room by 2 or 3 hops. The results of experiment are acceptable, however, it has much more work to do if we want to use it in real factory environment.

6. Conclusions

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Here in this paper we propose three different forms of network architecture, which have consequent features as different functional nodes integrated RFID tags or readers with sensor nodes. In the first class of integration form smart stations mixed RFID readers and WSN base stations are a decisive factor to the whole system. Base stations are complicated and costly and its very big volume also makes it difficult to move around. If there is something wrong with a smart station the whole system will break up and therefore reliability of the system is decreased. Compared with smart stations, the last two classes of integrations provide a new management much cheaper and more flexible. It will be an efficiency solution when real-time requirement is not strict and the transmitting data is not very large. On the other hand, when the number of transmitting data is very large or real-time work needs to completed, mixed RFID reader and WSN base station deployment will be very effective, further energy limits need not to be worried. Which form of integration shall be selected is usually cost-based and will be dependent upon the application. If the system is monitoring many objects over a limited range, one might choose to have heterogeneous network mixed WSN nodes and RFID tags for a higher real-time requirement or mini node network for fewer objects. On the other hand, if the system is monitoring objects over a wide range, one might choose distributed reduced functional sensor reader network for no such real-time requirement.

7. References
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[3] Klaus Finkenzeller. RFID Handbook. Wiley, 2nd edition, Apr 2003.
[4] Rolf ClaubergRFID and Sensor NetworksFrom Sensor/Actuator to Business ApplicationRFID WorkshopUniversity of St.GallenSwitzerland Sep 272004

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[5] D.Estrin, L.Giro, G.Pottie, and M.Srivastavat. Instrumenting the World with Wireless Sensor

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