Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2020 Apr 28;20(9):2495.
doi: 10.3390/s20092495.

A Review of IoT Sensing Applications and Challenges Using RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks

Hugo Landaluce  1 , Laura Arjona  2 , Asier Perallos  1 , Francisco Falcone  3 , Ignacio Angulo  1 , Florian Muralter  1
Affiliations
Review

A Review of IoT Sensing Applications and Challenges Using RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks

Hugo Landaluce et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensors networks (WSNs) are two fundamental pillars that enable the Internet of Things (IoT). RFID systems are able to identify and track devices, whilst WSNs cooperate to gather and provide information from interconnected sensors. This involves challenges, for example, in transforming RFID systems with identification capabilities into sensing and computational platforms, as well as considering them as architectures of wirelessly connected sensing tags. This, together with the latest advances in WSNs and with the integration of both technologies, has resulted in the opportunity to develop novel IoT applications. This paper presents a review of these two technologies and the obstacles and challenges that need to be overcome. Some of these challenges are the efficiency of the energy harvesting, communication interference, fault tolerance, higher capacities to handling data processing, cost feasibility, and an appropriate integration of these factors. Additionally, two emerging trends in IoT are reviewed: the combination of RFID and WSNs in order to exploit their advantages and complement their limitations, and wearable sensors, which enable new promising IoT applications.

Keywords: RFID sensor network; computational RFID; energy-harvesting; passive sensors; sensor tags; standards and communication protocols; wearable RFID; wireless communications.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Overview of the main challenges that prevent radio frequency identification (RFID) from becoming pervasive. The challenges are classified according to the RFID component or components (reader, passive sensor, communication protocol) which they affect.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Communications scheme using a sensing RFID neural implant [33,34].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Overview of the main challenges facing WSN technology. The most significant challenges contain other related ones.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Types of integration in WSN and RFID: (a) at tag level, (b) at reader level, (c) hybrid.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Wearable node integration for judo training/monitoring applications. Device integration has been analyzed in terms of human body impact on node performance in order to optimize the network layout as well as the integration of the device as described in Reference [80].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Chopra K., Gupta K., Lambora A. Future Internet: The Internet of Things—A Literature Review; Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Big Data, Cloud and Parallel Computing (COMITCon); Faridabad, India. 14–16 Feburary 2019; pp. 135–139.
    1. Nagakannan M., Inbaraj C.J., Kannan K.M., Ramkumar S. A Recent Review on Iot Based Techniques and Applications; Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud); Palladam, India. 30–31 August 2018; pp. 70–75.
    1. Ji W., Li L., Zhou W. Design and Implementation of a RFID Reader/Router in RFID-WSN Hybrid System. Future Internet. 2018;10:106. doi: 10.3390/fi10110106. - DOI
    1. Finkenzeller K. RFID Handbook: Radio-Frequency Identification Fundamentals and Applications. Wiley; Hoboken, NJ, USA: 1999.
    1. Souto G., Muralter F., Arjona L., Landaluce H., Perallos A. Protocol for Streaming Data from an RFID Sensor Network. Sensors. 2019;19:3148. doi: 10.3390/s19143148. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources