Passive UHF RFID Benchmarks in Retail Environment

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology using radio waves to identify the objects when moving between physical locations. In this chapter, we propose benchmarks to help understand the performance of passive ultrahigh frequency RFID in retail environment. Since the most significant feature in retail environment is item-level tagging, a reliable suit of evaluation benchmarks of performance is the most concerned in the implementation of RFID. An experimental method and a series of experiments are improved and presented. In the tests, read range is taken as a metric of read performance, and write range and write time are taken as metrics of write performance. We also define effective orientation and effective bandwidth issues to describe good performance. Finally, we show that material dependency and interference rejection issues challenge RFID implementation.