RFID as an Infrastructure

by Yan Qiao, Shigang Chen, and Tao Li

Published 14 September 2012

RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are becoming ubiquitously available in object tracking, access control, and toll payment. The current application model treats tags simply as ID carriers and deals with each tag individually for the purpose of identifying the object that the tag is attached to. The uniqueness of RFID as an Infrastructure is to change the traditional individual view to a collective view that treats universally-deployed tags as a new infrastructure, a new wireless platform on which novel applications can be developed.

The book begins with an introduction to the problems of tag estimation and information collection from RFID systems, and explains the challenges. It discusses how to efficiently estimate the number of tags in a large RFID system, considering both energy cost and execution time. It then gives a detailed account on how to collect information from a sensor-augmented RFID network with new designs that significantly reduce execution time.


Traffic Measurement on the Internet presents several novel online measurement methods that are compact and fast. Traffic measurement provides critical real-world data for service providers and network administrations to perform capacity planning, accounting and billing, anomaly detection, and service provision. Statistical methods play important roles in many measurement functions including: system designing, model building, formula deriving, and error analyzing. One of the greatest challenges in designing an online measurement function is to minimize the per-packet processing time in order to keep up with the line speed of the modern routers. This book also introduces a challenging problem – the measurement of per-flow information in high-speed networks, as well as, the solution. The last chapter discusses origin-destination flow measurement.