Enterprise-class RFID is still maturing

In addition to radio frequency identification encryption, discussed last time, there are a few other RFID infrastructure issues that are still maturing.

Also on the security front, for example, the industry is working on making sure only the organizations contributing to a stream of information (such as those in a supply chain) have access to the components of that information to which they are entitled, based on their roles and their various business agreements.

This discipline is known as “federated security,” and is not solely an RFID issue. About 150 global organizations, for example, have been at work under the auspices of the Liberty Alliance Project for about four years to build what they call a “trusted digital ecosystem” that controls identity and access in shared information systems. However, with the momentum behind RFID, some pundits are hopeful that RFID could help fuel federated security solutions.

Also, the industry is still working on standards for managing an RFID infrastructure. Currently, there are standards for what information goes on RFID tags, how a tag communicates with a reader and, most recently, how a reader infrastructure consolidates, or filters, data gathered from tags before forwarding it to upstream applications. This standard, recently ratified, is known as application-level events, or ALEs, and the function takes place in RFID middleware, which can reside in a number of locations in the network.

But for management of the reader infrastructure itself, Sun says it is working through the EPCglobal standards group for at least an SNMP management information base, which would allow readers to be managed by SNMP-based systems. An IETF effort, the Simple Lightweight RFID Reader Protocol, specifies the discovery of readers and might contain more detail on reader-specific management capabilities.

Meanwhile, the industry is still working on typical scalability issues for RFID readers, such as how to do firmware upgrades consistently across all readers, particularly in multivendor environment, and maintain them with all the latest security patches.