LLRP completes the RFID technology stack
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
The RFID hype is over. People are no longer going to conferences to learn about RFID and real adoption is taking place, only it is happening in areas other than where the industry thought it would occur.
Rather than for supply chain management, the adoption is in close-looped (single owner) asset management and in healthcare.
But that is about to change with a new standard called Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP, pronounced like "slurp") which finally completes the standards for RFID solution developers.
LLRP is a game-changing technology that completes the RFID technology stack and will provide the stability for developers to focus on higher level solutions, according to Harold Clamp, CEO of American RFID Solutions, who was speaking at the recent Motorola RFID summit in Bangkok.
Using the 20-year-old GSM vs CDMA battle as an example, Clamp said GSM won because it had a clearly-defined modular application stack with clearly defined specifications so that the interaction between modules was very clear.
Today the same is finally happening in RFID. The application stack in EPC Global consists of low level tag data : EPC Gen2, the LLRP, application level events, and the EPC Information System.
LLRP, specifications of which are open and available to anyone at llrp.org, standardises the client-to-reader interface. Before LLRP, programmers needed to learn how to program for each reader for each solution. This hampered flexibility and made development harder.
What this means to business is that LLRP allows developers and integrators to buy readers based solely on performance rather than having to worry about compatibility. It allows purchasing departments to make apples to apples comparisons and prevents vendor lock-in.
Motorola director of RFID and Wireless John Cunningham said a library of 8,433 case studies was enough to show that RFID could provide 100 per cent visibility, but the problem is how it could be applied to create business benefits and few studies looked at the business case.
The other key problem is that RFID projects still tend to be IT projects, rather than from top management and by the time it gets to top management, the business case is not strong enough or has grown too complicated to implement the back end. Then there's a lack of experts who have implemented end-to-end RFID solutions.
This has led to a lack of industry standards and vertical integration of the RFID chain. Instead, most successful projects are confined to one organisation which can be controlled, such as a hospital.
Richard Sebastian from Frost and Sullivan said that the biggest driver for RFID was government support as could be seen in Japan, Korea and Singapore where governments were directly funding projects so that the industry saw overall traction for the benefit of all.
Again, he cited a lack of standards (prior to LLRP), which made open-loop applications a major challenge.
So the success stories have all been closed-loop where one organisation owns the entire project. Freedom Tower in the US uses active RFID to measure the maturity of concrete and enables construction to be 20 per cent faster.
High security installations and many governments use RFID tags on documents. Local government in Kuala Lumpur uses RFID to track hoardings and Malaysia plans to tag all 80 million DVDs sold with RFID tags to combat counterfeiting. In sport, RFID is also being used to keep track of training sessions.
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