Wireless sensor networks and RFID integration for context aware services

Abstract

Recently, the debate over the integration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has garnered an increasing amount of attention despite their appearing to be disparate technologies. On one hand, the RFID community realizes how adding sensor data to their infrastructures could provide added value to the RFID-based services. On the other hand, the use of unique identifiers in WSN would improve their manageability in a future where millions of sensor nodes could be scattered across the globe. However, not only is it not clear which specific applications such an integration could bring, there is also no consensus regarding the best approach to achieve it. In this article, we propose a framework in which WSN and RFID coexist to provide context information about users and objects. WSN information is coupled with unique identifiers and participates in the RFID core services. Additionally, context aware services interact with the RFID infrastructure and provide real-time service to the users participating in the framework. AUTOIDLABS-WP-SWNET-026 Information and Communications University 119 Yuseong-gu, 305-714, Daejeon, South Korea e-mail: {tomas, kimd}@icu.ac.kr