Future RFID technology and applications: visions and challenges

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an exciting, rapidly growing, multidisciplinary technology, which is capable of automatically and uniquely identifying objects or persons by radio frequency within certain proximity. It is emerging as one of most fundamental technologies to ubiquitous computing, Internet of Things, intelligent transport systems, and web of things owing its low cost, automatic identification and broad applicability. RFID has achieved widespread success in various domains, ranging from animal identification, asset tracking, highway toll collection, smart home appliances, supply chain management, to surveillance systems. With massive RFID adoption, RFID presents a series of challenging issues that are significant and should be overcome before enjoying the benefits from RFID. These new challenges consist of energy-efficient data gathering and process in large-scale environments, software infrastructures for supporting Internet of Things, the interaction model for hand-held devices, the leading-edge innovations RFID applications, the business value and performance measurement, and security and privacy attacks. This special issue presents six papers, selected from more than twenty submissions around the world. A submission might be considered for publication on this special issue after two round review processes. In each round review process,