DASH7 on your iPhone: coming soon
The rumor mill is in full swing regarding potential plans by Apple to bake RFID into the iPhone. This is an important topic on many levels, but the first point I’ll make is around the importance of smartphones in the way we think about RFID infrastructure.
Individuals or companies that have worked with Wal-Mart or the U.S. Department of Defense to deploy RFID infrastructure know how costly it can be to deploy and maintain fixed RFID reader infrastructure. With the intersection of RFID and smartphones, the need for massive deployments of fixed infrastructure will gradually be replaced by the sheer ubiquity of RFID-enabled smartphones that are situated in almost all places, almost all the time. This is a fundamental paradigm shift for the RFID community and smartphones will play a leading role in enabling it. We call it “Just in Time Networking” since you have RFID network “coverage” anytime there is a smartphone in the vicinity with RFID read capability.
Here’s an example. Today, deploying RFID to monitor the goings-on in a warehouse (where’s my arc welder? where’s that order? where’s that cylinder of plutonium? it was just here a minute ago … ) typically requires the installation, operation and maintenance of one or more “fixed” RFID nodes, commonly referred to as readers. The reader usually has an ethernet connection as well as a connection to an AC power source. Without going into excruciating detail here, take my word for it that putting these fixed readers in place is today not exactly “plug and play” for many customers. (This does not mean there is not a good ROI when using fixed infrastructure – au contraire – it’s just that the ROI is even greater using JIT Networking.)
Instead, businesses will soon opt to integrate RFID readers on smartphones (via SIM, SD Card, or directly into the phone) and, given the assumption that there are usually one or more employees carrying cellphones in any single physical location of a business, the smartphones themselves will become substitutes for the fixed reader infrastructure of the past. Sure it’s possible you won’t get 100% “coverage” in that warehouse when every employee with an RFID-enabled smartphone goes home at night for dinner, but many businesses will simply “make do” with having no coverage during off hours and when the employee(s) return in the morning to open up the warehouse, their phones will immediately “illuminate” the warehouse with RFID coverage and voila, RFID visibility into the warehouse is re-established. Now if your business includes keeping tabs on cylinders of plutonium, this probably won’t fly. But for many businesses out there, this type of solution is “good enough” even if it is not “perfect”. As with many wireless technologies, good enough is, well, good enough.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Joel Hughes, Pat Burns and Guinea Pigz, dash7 alliance. dash7 alliance said: New Blog Post DASH7, the iPhone, and JIT Networking http://goo.gl/fb/3pI8 [...]
A really interesting article! The obvious one for RFID in an iPhone is an oyster card app. This could then allow the data to be shared with location based services : “where my friends are on the tube” etc
Putting aside the solveable privcy issues for the moment,I’d love to see RFID apps for business cards, store cards, rewards systems, identity etc. Some massive app potential there.
Joel
[...] the original here: DASH7, the iPhone, and JIT Networking | DASH7 Wireless Sensor … Share and [...]
What you are describing are advantages of ad-hoc networking vs infrastructure intensive networks. A key point to remember is that an ad-hoc network can be built incrementally. With a typical RFID architecture the fixed ‘readers’ have to be infrastructure tied (Ethernet and power). With your warehouse example, it is quite likely that for a large number of uses you really only care where things are when the people are in the warehouse. However there may be a few things that need to be connected 24/7. In those cases the same mobile technology can (cheaply) be plugged into deployed where needed (using existing infrastructure). This incremental scalability is a key value: it allows positive ROI on very small investment, with greater value achieved incrementally with build out. With traditional RFID approaches, a substantial investment is needed before any value can be realized. This ‘threshold effect’ keeps a lot of potential customers outside the gates, so to speak.
The coupling of this with location based services is how you get smart phone vendors to put it in the handset. They need a visible feature offering they can sell. Finding your friends in the mall, finding the item you’re looking for in the mega-huge warehouse store, targeted proximity advertizing, these are things the CE vendors and service providers can monetize. An ad-hoc network architecture is advantageous for the same reasons here – in most cases you get the connectivity you need when you need it ‘organically’, and in the small number of cases where you don’t you can address those cheaply and incrementally.
When you say “RFID in the iPhone” I have to ask “which one”. There are dozens (or more?) non-interoperable RFID systems in the field. So clearly the vision you have requires standards. There are in fact several (many?) efforts to create RFID standards (some published, some still in works) but all the ones I know about are driven by the infrastructure based networks and asymmetrical protocols. Likewise the trend for LBS has been going towards infrastructure based approaches (despite the limitations).
A key is a standards based bringing RFID and location based services together, using an inexpensive technology for local location awareness. The technology is ready…is the market?
Thanks, Ben.
Just to clarify, Just-in-Time Networking could be implemented as an ad-hoc network, as a star topology, or as P2P. In the case of DASH7, it can be either. Ad hoc too often implies “mesh” networking for these applications and in nearly all cases, mesh is overkill, kills batteries too quickly, and when deployed at 2.45 GHz, can’t penetrate walls and other important substances like concrete or things made of water like ice or heads of lettuce. Mesh concepts like ZigBee are promoted as mesh less because of the inherent advantages of mesh and more because of the inherent disadvantages of 2.45GHz, where most ZigBee is deployed. Ad hoc/mesh approaches are also popular with WiFi for purposes of providing a backhaul story for high speed internet access where fixed base stations/access points are unavailable, but this is not the mission I envision for smartphones.
I’ll do another post to answer the “which RFID flavor” question you pose, but my short answer is that a) very short range NFC should win a spot on the handset, b) Gen2 passive RFID reader capability will not win a spot given the massive power requirements, c) anything operating at 2.45GHz like ZigBee or ANT is about to be crushed by 802.11n interference, d) neither wifi nor bluetooth have gotten traction in the enterprise for reasons of latency and power draw, e) the single best RFID solution to complement short range NFC is low power, long range active RFID based on an ISO standard operating at 433 MHz, namely, DASH7. Works simply and elegantly for both tag and reader applications. Extremely low cost, globally available. Being deployed on SIM and SD card this year.
[...] 1. Buying, installing, and maintaining fixed RFID “reader” infrastructure can be expensive. [...]