TABLE OF CONTENTS It's commonly said that there are no standards in RFID. In fact, there are many well-established standards and a few emerging standards. Here's a guide to the most important ones.
Standards are critical for many RFID applications, such as payment systems and tracking goods or reusable containers in open supply chains. A great deal of work has been going on over the past decade to develop standards for different RFID frequencies and applications.
There are existing and proposed RFID standards that deal with the air interface protocol (the way tags and readers communicate), data content (the way data is organized or formatted), conformance (ways to test that products meet the standard) and applications (how standards are used on shipping labels, for example).
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has created standards for tracking cattle with RFID. ISO 11784 defines how data is structured on the tag. ISO 11785 defines the air interface protocol. ISO has created a standard for the air interface protocol for RFID tags used in payment systems and contactless smart cards (ISO 14443) and in vicinity cards (ISO 15693). It also has established standards for testing the conformance of RFID tags and readers to a standard (ISO 18047), and for testing the performance of RFID tags and readers (ISO 18046).
Using RFID to track goods in open supply chains is relatively new and fewer standards have been finalized. ISO has proposed standards for tracking 40-foot shipping containers, pallets, transport units, cases...
