Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a form of wireless communication that uses radio waves to identify and track objects.
The RFID device serves the same purpose as a bar code or a magnetic strip on the back of a credit card or ATM card; it provides a unique identifier for that object. And, just as a bar code or magnetic strip must be scanned to get the information, the RFID device must be scanned to retrieve the identifying information.
RFID takes the barcoding concept and digitizes it for the modern world providing the ability to:
• Uniquely identify an individual item beyond just its product type
• Identify items without direct line-of-sight
• Identify many items (up to 1,000s) simultaneously
• Identify items within a vicinity of between a few centimeters to several meters
An RFID system has readers and tags that communicate with each other by radio. RFID tags are so small and require so little power that they don’t even need a battery to store information and exchange data with readers. This makes it easy and cheap to apply tags to all kinds of things that people would like to identify or track.