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A survey on indoor positioning systems

This paper aims to provide the reader with a review of the main technologies explored in the literature to solve the indoor localization issue. Furthermore, some systems that use these enabling technologies in real-world scenarios are presented and discussed. This could deliver a better understanding of the state-of-the-art and motivate new research efforts in this promising field. Finally, focusing on one of the major challenges in the indoor localization field, i.e., the indoor animal tracking, existing indoor tracking systems have been reviewed and compared by analyzing advantages and drawbacks.

A novel MAC scheduler to minimize the energy consumption in a Wireless Sensor Network

The rising success of the Internet of Things has led the Wireless Sensor Networks to play an important role in many fields, ranging from military to civilian applications. However, since sensor nodes are battery powered, communication protocols and applications for these networks must be carefully designed in order to limit the power consumption. In this work, a new MAC protocol able to significantly reduce the power consumption and compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, is designed and validated. The defined protocol is based on an efficient setting of the nodes duty cycle as a function of the transmission times of the neighbor nodes. In a duty cycle period, each node wakes up once to transmit and N times to receive, where N is the number of neighbors, while it remains in sleep mode for the rest of the time. The defined protocol has been validated through both an analytical and a simulative approach. By using the first approach, the proposed solution is compared with another energy-efficient protocol, namely AS-MAC; then, the differences between the simulated scenario and the analytical one are analyzed. By using the second approach (through Omnet++ simulator), we carried out a performance comparison between our protocol and the current MAC protocol compliant with the ZigBee standard. All the results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed solution, which has proved to be flexible and efficient, since it is able to provide high energy savings at different date rate, without a negative impact on the packets delivery.

Smart RFID Antenna System for Indoor Tracking and Behavior Analysis of Small Animals in Colony Cages

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is more and more adopted in a wide range of applicative scenarios. Nevertheless, in many applications, commercial and general-purpose solutions can be unsuitable as in the case of the tracking of small-size living animals for the behavior analysis. In such a case, the whole RFID hardware, as well as the control software, should be opportunely tailored for the particular application. In this paper, a novel RFID-based approach enabling an effective localization and tracking of small-sized laboratory animals is proposed. It is mainly based on a near-field (NF) RFID multiantenna system working in the UHF bandwidth, to be placed below the animals cage, and able to rigorously identify the NF RFID tags implanted in laboratory animals. Once the requirements of the reader antenna have been individuated, an antenna system composed of a matrix of specifically designed segmented loops has been prototyped. Moreover, to improve the effectiveness of the whole tracking system, a properly algorithm based on the measured received signal strength indication has been developed and integrated. It aims at removing potential minor ambiguities of the data captured by the multiantenna system. The whole animal tracking system has been then largely tested on phantom mice to verify its ability to precisely localize each subject and to reconstruct its path. Additionally, a first test performed on living mice has been presented. The achieved and discussed results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

RFID, EPC and B2B convergence towards an item-level traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain

The item-level tagging is one of the main challenges of many application scenarios. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain represents a very interesting case where the new auto-identification technologies, based on RFID and EPCglobal, will play a very import role. The authors present practical experiences gained from a recent research project on the item-level traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Furthermore, a discussion on several areas of improvement opportunities for future large-scale deployments of these technologies is reported.

A Software Architecture Enabling the Web of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) will include billions of smart “things” connected to the Web and characterized by sensing, actuating, and data processing capabilities. In this context, also known as Web of Things (WoT), the user should ideally be able to collect information provided by smart things, and to mash-up them to obtain value-added services. However, in the current solutions, the access to physical objects is poorly scalable and efficient, the communications are often unidirectional (from the devices to the users), and only tech-savvy people are able to develop mash-up applications. Based on these assumptions, we propose a software architecture to easily mash-up constrained application protocol (CoAP) resources. It is able to discover the available devices and to virtualize them outside the physical network. These virtualizations are then exposed to the upper layers by a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) interface, so that the physical devices interact only with their own virtualization. Furthermore, the system provides simplified tools allowing the development of mash-up applications to different-skilled users. Finally, the architecture allows not only to monitor but also to control the devices, thus establishing a bidirectional communication channel. To evaluate the proposal, we deeply modify and integrate some existing software components to realize an instance of the architecture.

Enhanced UHF RFID Tags for Drug Tracing

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is playing a crucial role for item-level tracing systems in healthcare scenarios. The pharmaceutical supply chain is a fascinating application context, where RFID can guarantee transparency in the drug flow, supporting both suppliers and consumers against the growing counterfeiting problem. In such a context, the choice of the most adequate RFID tag, in terms of shape, frequency, size and reading range, is crucial. The potential presence of items containing materials hostile to the electromagnetic propagation exasperates the problem. In addition, the peculiarities of the different RFID-based checkpoints make even more stringent the requirements for the tag. In this work, the performance of several commercial UHF RFID tags in each step of the pharmaceutical supply chain has been evaluated, confirming the expected criticality. On such basis, a guideline for the electromagnetic design of new high-performance tags capable to overcome such criticalities has been defined. Finally, driven by such guidelines, a new enhanced tag has been designed, realized and tested. Due to patent pending issues, the antenna shape is not shown. Nevertheless, the optimal obtained results do not lose their validity. Indeed, on the one hand they demonstrate that high performance item level tracing systems can actually be implemented also in critical operating conditions. On the other hand, they encourage the tag designer to follow the identified guidelines so to realize enhanced UHF tags.

Performance Evaluation of UHF RFID Tags in the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

The item-level tagging is one of the main challenges in the pharmaceutical distribution in order to improve track and trace systems. The RFID technology will play a very important role in development of auto-identification solutions. In this chapter, we focus on the use of passive UHF tags, in order to analyze a performance comparison between near field and far field UHF RFID systems. Some different passive UHF tags, suitably chosen, have been tested at item-level, i.e., on each single medicine package, simulating each stage of the pharmaceutical supply chain in a controlled laboratory environment. The obtained experimental results, in terms of successful read rates, have shown that the use of passive far field UHF tags represents an advantage solution to guarantee high performance in an item-level tracing system in the whole supply chain.

A novel architecture enabling the visual implementation of web of Things applications

The concept of Internet of Things is becoming one of the key aspects for the future Internet, where embedded devices will be responsible for collecting data from the surrounding environment and making them available to useful mash-up applications. In order to guarantee a high feasibility of this scenario, it would be appropriate to have a flexible and intuitive architecture for the implementation of such applications without knowing specific details about the constrained hardware and operating system. Therefore, in this work, a software system for the graphical development of mash-up applications, dedicated to Wireless Sensor Networks, was designed and implemented. It is based on a Constrained Application Protocol application server, called Actinium, and on a graphical editor, called ClickScript. Especially the latter one has been substantially modified in order to communicate with Actinium and to interact with the constrained resources made available by the WSN. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been tested through a real use case that has demonstrated the validity of the whole system.

Improving item-level tracing systems through Ad Hoc UHF RFID tags

In many practical applications, the item-level tracing systems based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is becoming more and more essential. Nevertheless, the requirements that an RFID tag should satisfy in the different steps of the supply chain, cannot be met by general purpose commercial tags, whose adoption would lead to low-performance systems. In this paper, we are presenting the properties of an ad hoc Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tag, designed and realized in order to work properly in the entire supply chain. The proposed tag has been tested to trace some critical pharmaceutical products, containing metals and liquids, and has been compared with a pre-selected commercial tag. Both tags mount the same chip. The very impressive results, reported in this paper, clearly demonstrate that well-designed ad hoc tags effectively improve the performance of any item-level tracing system.

Evaluating potential benefits of the use of RFID, EPCglobal, and ebXML in the pharmaceutical supply chain

This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, EPCglobal and ebXML on some business processes that are critical to the success of the pharmaceutical supply chain. Particular attention is focused on the wholesaler because it represents a particular stress point in terms of constraints and product flow. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of some current (AS IS) supply chain processes was performed on a big pharmaceutical wholesaler. It allowed us to identify some critical factors in the main business processes. In order to guarantee an efficient item-level tracing system in the whole supply chain, a re-engineering procedure has been defined exploiting an approach based on the combined use of RFID, EPCglobal, and ebXML. The key performance indicator (KPI) method has been chosen to carry out the analysis of the potential benefits by using an empirical method based on the living laboratory approach. This rigorous experimental approach, performed in a controlled test environment, allowed us to derive a realistic estimate of the selected performance indicators for the reengineered (TO BE) model.