RFID 2009 - Special Issue of IEEE Proceedings - RFID - A Unique Radio Innovation for the 21st Century

Website http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/rfid/AcademicForum/2009/ | Edit Freely

Category RFID 2009

Deadline: March 15, 2009 | Date: July 15, 2009

Venue/Country: world, China

Updated: 2010-06-04 19:32:22 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

Proceedings of the IEEE

(http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/pubs/proceedings/index.html) is organizing

a special issue of its publication entitled:"RFID - A Unique Radio

Innovation for the 21st Century".

Introduction and Background to the topic

Today RFID is finding its ways into industrial sectors ranging from retail

for tracking inventory to manufacturing for tracking product status to

airlines for finding lost baggage. While RFID technology has been around for

decades, it is only in the last few years that a rapid reduction in prices

of readers and tags, coupled with the advancement in enterprise I.T.

systems, along with demand from marquee customers such as Wal-Mart has

spurred the awareness, business value and deployment of RFID. By tracking

assets, supplies and personnel, enterprises are now beginning to experiment

with new business models to integrate RFID within their enterprise. While

the first generation of RFID technology involved reading one or a small

number of ID-only tags at a time with basic reader configurations with the

majority of the applications being for tracking inventory, now, the next

generation of applications are resulting in a far greater set of

sophisticated requirements on tags, readers, middleware, infrastructure and

I.T.

Examples of this new generation of applications include, retailers starting

to use RFID to automate shelf replacement to prevent dissatisfied customers,

or, hospitals using RFID to track critical devices that save patients' lives

and improve healthcare quality and process flow. In a related discipline,

pharmaceutical firms are using RFID to help prevent counterfeit drugs from

reaching pharmacies. Grocers are using intelligent sensor-laden RFID tags to

prevent food from spoiling. Such leading-edge innovations in the

applications of RFID are continually pushing the borders of RFID capability

and inducing research, innovation and scaled adoption, undergoing

specialization even within individual vertical industries and applications.

In response to a demand for such vertical applications of RFID within each

industry, standards, technologies, protocols, and middleware are being

innovated on appropriately. For example, while retail industry's supply

chain application has adopted EPC Gen 2 at ultra high frequency (900 MHz)

with passive tags, healthcare industry's asset tracking application has

refined active RFID operating at several different frequencies including 433

MHz and 2.4 GHz for finding patients. Increasingly specialized industry

specific frequencies, protocols and hardware are rapidly appearing in the

marketplace, thereby creating the impetus for research and the next

generation of applications causing a virtuous cycle of innovations and

applications.

While innovations continue to advance the field, the marketplace in

combination with the physical realities of RF-reading capability, eliminate

the unviable options, while furthering the viable ones. The need for a

special issue is therefore to bring together the research community with the

engineering and business community to form a picture of the state-of-the-art

in the field in terms of the current progress on research and innovations in

RFID, innovative applications, innovative methods of adoption and absorption

of RFID by the enterprises, innovative business and case studies, and a view

into what the future holds for this field.

Special Issue Overview

The special issue will focus on the research and technical innovations in

RFID hardware (readers/tags), middleware/software, applications, systems and

business cases in RFID. On the reader side, system on a chip is a new

paradigm that is allowing smaller, efficient and faster readers. Mobile

readers are being developed for newer applications such as healthcare and

pharmaceuticals where doctors can carry such readers on their belts.

Research innovations in software defined radios are also making their way

into reader designs that allow for reading of multiple

frequency/protocol/standard tags. RFID tags themselves have become highly

specialized ?V for example apparel tags and aerospace tags have little in

common. Research into tags involves a variety of topics as listed below.

Using readers and tags to develop applications typically requires the use of

a middleware program. Middleware typically allow scalability, homogeneity,

security in the enterprise, integratabilty with enterprise I.T., modularity

of system architecture, and other software benefits. Applications developed

with the use of middleware are rapidly becoming more common due to such

benefits that middleware??s provide. However, as we move to a more

ubiquitous RFID environment, where organizations in different industries

with their own specialized middleware want to communicate with each other,

newer middleware architectures may be required.

Eventually, enterprises require applications where RFID can provide a

benefit to their business. This implies that with all the innovations

happening around us, eventually it is the enterprise that will dictate which

technology it is able to absorb. For example, whether the Pharmaceutical

industry would adopt HP??s Memory spot tag (large memory tag) or Hitachi??s

new dust chip for their ePedigree mandate would depend on how these

technologies perform within the enterprise, the price/performance, the

needs, process constraints, cost of respective systems, standards used,

return on investment of the two respective systems, etc. Therefore bringing

in the systems and business issues into the up-front discussion at the

research stage itself could spur unique and different innovations ?V much

like the Wal-Mart mandate in 2005 spurred innovations in the EPC (Electronic

Product Code) protocol specifically for retail that are well beyond those

supported by the existing HF-tags operating on various ISO protocols.

Bringing these together, the topics for the forum include the following:

Topics include, but not limited to:

Reader Technology

Hardware design

Protocols

Antenna systems

System on a Chip (SOC)

Design of stationery, mobile, personal and handheld readers

Tag Technology

Intelligent tags

Security and encryption

Power efficiency

Antenna design

Protocols of communication

High memory tags

Tag-to-tag communications

Tag storage

Communication speed and tag data download rates

Low cost developments

Miniaturization and materials innovations

Active, semi-active, semi-passive and passive technologies

Nano and MEMS technologies for ultra-small, low-power tags

RFID Middleware technology

RFID Middleware Architecture

Security

Database integration

Speed issues in data movement

Integration with ERP, SCM and MRP

Web services

SOA (Services oriented architecture)

Enterprise I.T. architecture and middleware touch points

Technological and system issues

How it affects WLAN, WWAN, PAN, and other wireless networks

Infrastructure management

Impact on enterprise security

Wireless interference

Effect on physical products containing liquids and metal

RFID implants

RF modeling and simulation of reader-tag systems

System design, prototyping and scaling

Applications/Industries

Inventory Management

Asset Management

Retail

Manufacturing

Supply Chain

Pharmaceuticals

Healthcare/Medicine/Biotech/Biology

Aerospace / Airlines / Airport and baggage management

Automotive

Shipbuilding, Entertainment/Media

Financial / Mobile Payments

Security and access

Business Issues of RFID

ROI analysis at unit and enterprise levels

Revenue models in RFID services

Effect of RFID on process improvement for the enterprise

Impact on the CIO/I.T. office

Legal issues in RFID

Business versus consumer applications

In support of the special issue, UCLA-WINMEC is hosting a one-day forum on

Feb 24th, 2008 to encourage the community to come together, present their

research ideas, exchange information, and raise questions and discuss

research issues. We are also inviting potential authors to present their

research at this forum so that the authors can get a chance to evaluate

their own work in concert with what the community is doing and network with

the community, allow the Editorial Committee to give input to the potential

authors on their research, and subsequently for those papers that are

meritorious, recommend them to submit to the special issue of the journal.

The URL for this forum is

http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/rfid/AcademicForum/2008/ (for further information

- email RFIDForumwinmec.ucla.edu

winmec.ucla.edu?Subject=RFID%20Forum%202008%20Abstract%20S

ubmission> ). For the forum itself, an on-line proceedings will be created

with abstracts.

Authors Guide

Authors wishing to submit their papers should download the PDF file.

<http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/IEEEProceedings/view.pdf>

The URL where authors can submit their papers is

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pieee - the Manuscript Central. It is shared

by all working issues of Proceedings. Authors should begin by creating

accounts first. After receiving their password, they should go to the

"author center" and follow step-by-step instruction to submit a new

manuscript. Authors should indicate the special issue on RFID.

Important Dates (2008 - 2009)

February 24, 09

RFID event in UCLA <http://www.winmec.ucla.edu/rfid/AcademicForum/2009/>

March 15, 09

Paper submission deadline

April 30, 09

Review completed. Review comments and decisions sent to authors.

May 31, 09

Authors accepted or conditionally accepted - return reviewed papers to

associate editors with appropriate changes.

June 20, 09

Final List of papers decided for special issue

June 30, 09

Final acceptance and list of papers sent to IEEE

July 15, 09

All papers production ready to IEEE by authors.

Yours sincerely

Guest Editorial Team

Rajit Gadh (Chief Editor)

George Roussos (Associate Editor)

Katina Michael (Associate Editor)

George Huang (Associate Editor)

Shiv Prabhu (Associate Editor)

Peter Chu (Associate Editor)