Radio Frequency Identification

Lesson #8 Final Paper

Tiankai Qu

International American University

BUS 530: Management Information Systems

Kimberly Hoyt

Mar 3rd, 2017

Part 1: Why are radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensor networks valuable for business?

Nowadays with the frequently and rapidly developed mobile technologies, wireless systems are starting to take more and more important roles in enterprise business. Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems and wireless sensor networks (WSN) are the two spectacular techniques that place major part of influence among the wildly using mobile technologies.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are the powerful methodology that wildly used throughout modern supply chain that keep tracking of the movements and location of goods. RFID systems use RFID tags and RFID readers as the senors and receivers to transmit and contain identical information data like item numbers and locations. RFID tags are small tiny tags that labeled on the goods that embedded with small microchips loaded with identical data for each items. There is also an small antenna that passes the data stored in the microchips to RFID readers embedded in the tags. The RFID readers are small unit consists of antenna and radio senors which embedded processing microchips that run the process of transmitting the data from RFID tags to destination computer that installed in the company’s tracking system and within the local network.

Whenever a RFID reader connects to a RFID tag within a certain range, the tag will be activated and send the data to the reader. The reader then receives data and starts the process of decoding and sends the decoded data to a host computer within a wireless local network for future use.

RFID systems are wildly used in supply chain management and inventory control, because it can store and process more detailed information about items. Especially when a huge amount if items are shipped, RFID can provide a faster and safer way to maintain and manage all their data than the previous methods such as bar coding systems.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are networks that use many interconnected wireless devices that spatially distributed into the physical environment as measurement points over large spaces to capture, store and process measurement data for future analysis. The devices are always inset in to the environment physically and embedded with sensors, processors, storage and antennas.

The networks of these are interconnected networks, and all the senors are wireless devices, so they are called wireless sensor networks. The senors are considered as nodes in these networks, and there are a large range of nodes inside this system, the number of the nodes always rage from hundreds to thousands. The senors should be embedded in one place for years without any maintenance, as a result, they must have batteries to keep lasting for a long time and with very low power requirements.