Wireless firmware execution control in computational RFID systems

Current Computational RFID Tags (CRFIDs) are pre-programmed with only a single firmware instance in their flash memories for runtime operation where the functionality of CRFID is pre-determined by the firmware at the time of programming. As a result, the current CRFIDs require wired interface to re-program a new firmware which strictly limits their use to easy-to-reach places. We address this issue by remotely changing the behavior of CRFIDs by switching their firmware through commercial RFID reader and the EPC protocol, without demanding any hardware upgrades to CRFID tags or modification to EPC standard. We articulate the design, implementation and evaluation of FirmSwitch - a wireless scheme that equips CRFIDs with the capability of switching their firmware during runtime. This is achieved by wirelessly passing the encoded switching parameters to CRFID tag through RFID reader which leverages the tag to switch among firmwares and execute them for intended cycles. We further employ the schemes of pre-defined EPC and pre-calculated CRC for computational liberty and energy efficiency. For concept validation, we develop a User Interface to switch between four firmwares and extensively test our scheme. The results show that FirmSwitch offers a minimal energy overhead of 11.5nJ to 2.037μJ, and incurs a switching delay of 7.8 to 1498 μsec. As overall, our system achieves a success rate of 87% for an interrogation range of 0.5 meter.

[1]  Alanson P. Sample,et al.  Wirelessly powered bistable display tags , 2013, UbiComp.

[2]  Mo Li,et al.  Read Bulk Data From Computational RFIDs , 2014, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[3]  Joshua R. Smith.  Wirelessly Powered Sensor Networks and Computational RFID , 2013 .

[4]  Daniel E. Holcomb,et al.  Power-Up SRAM State as an Identifying Fingerprint and Source of True Random Numbers , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[5]  Joshua R. Smith,et al.  Battery-free wireless identification and sensing , 2005, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[6]  M. Ilyas,et al.  RFID Handbook: Applications, Technology, Security, and Privacy , 2008 .

[7]  Yue Wang,et al.  Exploiting Half-Wits: Smarter Storage for Low-Power Devices , 2011, FAST.

[8]  Chunhong Chen,et al.  Power efficient multi-stage CMOS rectifier design for UHF RFID tags , 2011, Integr..

[9]  Nitesh Saxena,et al.  Still and Silent: Motion Detection for Enhanced RFID Security and Privacy without Changing the Usage Model , 2010, RFIDSec.

[10]  Tadayoshi Kohno,et al.  RFIDs and secret handshakes: defending against ghost-and-leech attacks and unauthorized reads with context-aware communications , 2008, CCS.

[11]  Deepak Ganesan,et al.  BLINK: a high throughput link layer for backscatter communication , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[12]  David Wetherall,et al.  Recognizing daily activities with RFID-based sensors , 2009, UbiComp.

[13]  Joshua R. Smith,et al.  Sifting through the airwaves: Efficient and scalable multiband RF harvesting , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on RFID (IEEE RFID).

[14]  J. R. Smith,et al.  A wearable UHF RFID-based EEG system , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID).

[15]  Kevin Fu,et al.  Getting Things Done on Computational RFIDs with Energy-Aware Checkpointing and Voltage-Aware Scheduling , 2008, HotPower.

[16]  Kevin Fu,et al.  On the limits of effective hybrid micro-energy harvesting on mobile CRFID sensors , 2010, MobiSys '10.

[17]  David Wetherall,et al.  Ambient backscatter: wireless communication out of thin air , 2013, SIGCOMM.

[18]  Daniele Trinchero,et al.  Concealable, low-cost paper-printed antennas for WISP-based RFIDs , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on RFID.

[19]  Enamul Hoque,et al.  Monitoring body positions and movements during sleep using WISPs , 2010, Wireless Health.