Integration of RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are two important wireless technologies that have wide variety of applications and provide limitless future potentials. However, RFID and sensor networks almost are under development in parallel way. Integration of RFID and wireless sensor networks attracts little attention from research community. This paper first presents a brief introduction on RFID, and then investigates recent research works, new products/patents and applications that integrate RFID with sensor networks. Four types of integration are discussed. They are integrating tags with sensors, integrating tags with wireless sensor nodes, integrating readers with wireless sensor nodes and wireless devices, and mix of RFID and sensors. New challenges and future works are discussed in the end.