No / Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely applied in many scenarios such as inventory control, supply chain management due to its superior properties including fast identification and relatively long interrogating range over barcode systems. It is critical to efficiently identify the unknown tags because these tags can appear when new tagged objects are moved in or wrongly placed. The state-of-the-art Basic Unknown tag Identification Protocol-with Collision-Fresh slot paring (BUIP-CF) protocol can first deactivate all the known tags and then collect all the unknown tags. However, BUIP-CF protocol investigates an ALOHA-like technique and causes too many tag responses, which results in low efficiency. This paper proposes a Fast Unknown tag Identification (FUI) protocol which investigates an indicator vector to label the unknown tags with a given accuracy and removes the time-consuming tag responses in the deactivation phase. FUI also adopts the classical Enhanced Dynamic Framed Slotted ALOHA (EDFSA) protocol to collect the labeled unknown tags. We then investigate the optimal parameter settings to maximize the performance of the proposed FUI protocol. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed FUI protocol and the experimental results show that it considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art protocol.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) uses RF radiation to identify physical objects. With decreasing integrated circuit (IC) cost and size, RFID applications are becoming economically feasible and gaining popularity. Researchers at MIT suggest that RFID tags operating in the 900 MHz band (ultrahigh frequency, UHF) represent the best compromise of cost, read range, and capabilities [1]. Passive RFID tags, which exclude radio transmitters and internal power sources, are popular due to their small size and low cost [1]. This project produced Cal Poly’s first ever on-campus printed, assembled, and operational UHF (902 to 928 MHz) passive RFID tag. Project goals include RFID tag antenna design and simulation using the EMPro electromagnetic (EM) simulation tool [47], establishing the tag fabrication process, and testing, operational verification, and comparisons to commercial tag performance. The tag antenna design goal is to meet or exceed the read range performance of the commercial Sirit tag [23] while minimizing the required tag conductive area. This thesis provides an overview of the UHF passive RFID tag fabrication process. Cal Poly’s Graphic Communication Department Laboratory applied a screen‑printing process to print RFID tag antenna patterns onto plastic (PET) substrates. RFID IC-substrate packages were manually attached to tag antennas with conductive adhesives and functionally verified and compared to commercial tag performance. RFID tag antennas were impedance matched (using EMPro) to the Monza 3 RFID IC to maximize IC to antenna power transfer and RFID tag read range.Tag antenna read range (maximum reader-tag communication distance) was characterized in Cal Poly’s Anechoic Chamber, while RFID tag matching characteristics were measured using the differential probe method [33-41] and compared to simulations. Read range results indicate that one of the designs developed in this thesis outperforms a commercial UHF RFID tag.

Ce mémoire concerne les techniques d'indexation dans des bases d'image, ainsi que les méthodes de localisation en robotique mobile. Il fait le lien entre les travaux en Perception du pôle Robotique et Intelligence Artificielle du LAAS-CNRS, et les recherches sur la fouille de données menées à l'Université de Rabat. Depuis une dizaine d'années, la vision est devenue une source de données sensorielles essentielles sur les robots mobiles: elle fournit en particulier des représentations de l'environnement dans lequel doit se déplacer un robot sous la forme de modèles géométriques ou de modèles fondés sur l'apparence. Concernant la vision, seules les représentations fondées sur l'apparence ont été considérées; elles consistent en une base d'images acquises lors de déplacements effectués de manière supervisée durant une phase d'apprentissage. Le robot se localise en recherchant dans la base d'images, celle qui ressemble le plus à l'image courante: les techniques exploitées pour ce faire sont des méthodes d'indexation, similaires à celles exploitées en fouille de données sur Internet par exemple. Nous proposons une approche fondés sur des points d'intérêt extraits d'images en couleur texturées. Par ailleurs, nous présentons une technique de navigation par RFID (Radio Frequency IDentifier) qui utilise la méthode MonteCarlo, appliquée soit de manière intuitive, soit de manière formelle. Enfin, nous donnons des résultats très préliminaires sur la combinaison d'une perception par capteurs RFID et par capteurs visuels afin d'améliorer la précision de la localisation du robot mobile. / This document is related both to indexing methods in image data bases and to localization methods used in mobile robotics. It exploits the relationships between research works on Perception made in the Robotics department of LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, and on Data Mining performed by the LIMAIARF lab at the Rabat University. Computer Vision has become a major source of sensory data on mobile robots for about ten years; it allows to build especially representations of the environment in which a robot has to execute motions, either by geometrical maps or by appearance-based models. Concerning computer vision, only appearance-based representations have been studied; they consist on a data base of images acquired while the robot is moved in an interactive way during a learning step. Robot self-localization is provided by searching in this data base, the image which looks like the one acquired from the current position: this function is performed from indexing or data mining methods, similar to the ones used on Internet. It is proposed an indexing method based on interest points extracted from color and textured images. Moreover, geometrical representations are also considered for an RFID-based navigation method, based on particle filtering, used either in a classical formal way or with a more intuitive approach. Finally, very preliminar results are described on a multi-sensory approach using both Vision and RFID tags in order to improve the accuracy on the robot localization

This thesis communicates a new approach for the future Library system using secure NFC technology. Today we can use NFC and Android based mobile phones to build modern library system in which user will instead of standing in the queue can directly borrow and return books. The NFC technology which will use in this thesis is capable of storing small amount of information. This storage will be used for maintaining the books records. Although the NFC works in close proximity but still there are possibilities of attacks. Due to contact less communication the victim cannot notice the attacks. There are different types of attacks which can occur including modification of data and listening to the communication by unknown user. Therefore in this thesis the author will look into how one can protect the system from these kinds of at-tacks. The motivation behind the thesis is to introduce scalable cloud based infrastructure as a backbone Library. Current systems using bar code technology are not secure. Therefore an infrastructure needs to be built which includes cloud based server for key distribution and data storage. Furthermore, this thesis includes a study of the encryption and decryption schemes for close proximity communications. A new novel algorithm has been introduced and implemented as an encryption scheme for this thesis work. The Huffman scheme has been modified and 16 bit keys have been used for the key exchange. The new approach is compared with the existing techniques and found that it is reliable as compared to other techniques.

No / Tank flooding have become major causes of pollution both in residential and industrial areas majorly caused by overflows of water(mostly residential) and volatile poisonous industrial liquids from the storage tanks. An effective way of avoiding this problem will be by deploying some mechanism to monitor liquid level at each point in time and escalating unusual liquid levelsto a pump control circuit or to the relevant authorities for prompt action to avoid a flooding occurrence. This paper presents a low cost power efficient liquid level monitoring technique. Passive RFID tags are designed modelled and deployed, the signal variation from the Alien Reader Software are used to effectively estimate the level of liquid in any surface or underground tank. The experimental set up is presented and an expository presentation is made of the passive tag design, modelled and simulated and adopted for same application.

No / Sewer and gully flooding have become major causes of pollution particularly in the residential areas majorly caused by blockages in the water system and drainages. An effective way of avoiding this problem will be by deploying some mechanism to monitor gully pot water level at each point in time and escalating unusual liquid levels to the relevant authorities for prompt action to avoid a flooding occurrence. This paper presents a low cost power efficient gully pot liquid level monitoring technique. Passive RFID tags are deployed and signal variation from the Alien Reader Software are used to effectively estimate the level of liquid in the gully pot. The experimental set up is presented and an expository presentation is made of the passive tag design, modelled and simulated and adopted for same application.

The purpose of this thesis is to design a secure and optimized cryptographic stream cipher for passive type Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID technology is a wireless automatic tracking and identification device. It has become an integral part of our daily life and it is used in many applications such as electronic passports, contactless payment systems, supply chain management and so on. But the information carried on RFID tags are vulnerable to unauthorized access (or various threats) which raises the security and privacy concern over RFID devices. One of the possible solutions to protect the confidentiality, integrity and to provide authentication is, to use a cryptographic stream cipher which encrypts the original information with a pseudo-random bit sequence. Besides that RFID tags require a resource constrained environment such as efficient area, power and high performance cryptographic systems with large security margins. Therefore, the architecture of stream cipher provides the best trade-off between the cryptographic security and the hardware efficiency. In this thesis, we first described the RFID technology and explain the design requirements for passive type RFID tags. The hardware design for passive tags is more challenging due to its stringent requirements like power consumption and the silicon area. We presented different design measures and some of the optimization techniques required to achieve low-resource cryptographic hardware implementation for passive tags. Secondly, we propose and implement a lightweight WG-5 stream cipher, which has good proven cryptographic mathematical properties. Based on these properties we measured the security analysis of WG-5 and showed that the WG-5 is immune to different types of attacks such as algebraic attack, correlation attack, cube attack, differential attack, Discrete Fourier Transform attack (DFT), Time-Memory-Data trade-off attack. The implementation of WG-5 was carried out using 65 nm and 130 nm CMOS technologies. We achieved promising results of WG-5 implementation in terms of area, power, speed and optimality. Our results outperforms most of the other stream ciphers which are selected in eSTREAM project. Finally, we proposed RFID mutual authentication protocol based on WG-5. The security and privacy analysis of the proposed protocol showed that it is resistant to various RFID attacks such as replay attacks, Denial-of-service (DoS) attack, ensures forward privacy and impersonation attack.

The purpose of this thesis is to design a secure and optimized cryptographic stream cipher for passive type Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID technology is a wireless automatic tracking and identification device. It has become an integral part of our daily life and it is used in many applications such as electronic passports, contactless payment systems, supply chain management and so on. But the information carried on RFID tags are vulnerable to unauthorized access (or various threats) which raises the security and privacy concern over RFID devices. One of the possible solutions to protect the confidentiality, integrity and to provide authentication is, to use a cryptographic stream cipher which encrypts the original information with a pseudo-random bit sequence. Besides that RFID tags require a resource constrained environment such as efficient area, power and high performance cryptographic systems with large security margins. Therefore, the architecture of stream cipher provides the best trade-off between the cryptographic security and the hardware efficiency. In this thesis, we first described the RFID technology and explain the design requirements for passive type RFID tags. The hardware design for passive tags is more challenging due to its stringent requirements like power consumption and the silicon area. We presented different design measures and some of the optimization techniques required to achieve low-resource cryptographic hardware implementation for passive tags. Secondly, we propose and implement a lightweight WG-5 stream cipher, which has good proven cryptographic mathematical properties. Based on these properties we measured the security analysis of WG-5 and showed that the WG-5 is immune to different types of attacks such as algebraic attack, correlation attack, cube attack, differential attack, Discrete Fourier Transform attack (DFT), Time-Memory-Data trade-off attack. The implementation of WG-5 was carried out using 65 nm and 130 nm CMOS technologies. We achieved promising results of WG-5 implementation in terms of area, power, speed and optimality. Our results outperforms most of the other stream ciphers which are selected in eSTREAM project. Finally, we proposed RFID mutual authentication protocol based on WG-5. The security and privacy analysis of the proposed protocol showed that it is resistant to various RFID attacks such as replay attacks, Denial-of-service (DoS) attack, ensures forward privacy and impersonation attack.

Although the origins of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology can be traced back for many years, it is only recently that RFID has experienced rapid growth. That growth is mainly due to the increasing application of this technology in various supply chains. The widening of the implementation of RFID technology in supply chains has posed many challenges and one of the biggest is the degradation of the RFID system performance when tagging metallic objects, or when the RFID system operates in a metallic environment. This thesis focuses on tackling the issue of having metallic objects in an Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID system. The work presented in this thesis contributes to the research on UHF RFID systems involving metallic objects in several ways: (a) the development of novel RFID tags that range from a simple tag for general applications to tags suitable for metallic object identification; (b) the tag designs target the criteria of minimal tag size and cost to embrace the vision of item level tagging; and (c) the analysis of the performance (through theoretical predictions and practical measurements) of an RFID tag near metallic structures of various shapes and sizes. The early part of this thesis provides a brief introduction to RFID and reviews the background information related to metallic object identification for UHF RFID systems. The process of designing a basic tag, and additional information and work done related to the process, are outlined in the early part of this thesis. As part of this fundamental research process, and before proceeding to the designing of tags specifically for metallic objects, a small and low cost RFID tag for general applications was developed. Details of the design of this tag, with the application of this tag for animal identification, are presented. In the later parts of the work, different tag design approaches were explored and this has generated three rather different RFID tags suitable for attaching to metallic objects. The aim of this research is not just to design tags for metallic objects but also to tackle the constraints of having tags that are small in size, cost effective and suited in size to some familiar objects. Hence, in the later part of this research, the work took a step further where one of the three tags designed for metallic objects addressed the challenge of identifying individual small metallic beverage cans. RFID involves tagging of different types of objects and a tag may be required to be located in a depression of a metallic object. In the final part of this research, the read range performance of one of the RFID tags designed for metallic objects was analysed when the tag was located in metallic depressions of various shapes and sizes. The analysis was performed from a combination of theoretical calculation and simulation perspectives, and also through practical real-life measurements. Metallic objects are very common around us. Their presence is unavoidable and so to identify them, having the appropriate RFID tags suitable for operation on metallic surfaces is essential. Frequently the tags must be small in size and low in cost to allow identification at item level of individual small metallic objects. Understanding and being aware of the potential effects of metallic structures of various shapes and sizes on the tag performance is thus important. The research in this thesis into all the above can bring the industry further towards full deployment of RFID down to item level tagging. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2008

This report documents the design, construction, and implementation of a differential-offset spread spectrum RFID system, to avoid the problem of anti-collision interference from multiple RFID tags. Currently in industry, this problem is handled by establishing a two way communication link between the tags and the interrogator. The proposed system eliminates the need for the excessive hardware use to create this link, and therefore drastically reduces the cost of each tag. Not only is this system cheaper to implement but it is faster, requires less power, and by the nature of the design contains an inherent encryption scheme for the data being transmitted. Specialized RFID tags were designed and fabricated in order to produce a pseudo random code unique to each tag. The design presented in this document allowed simultaneous interrogation of up to 255 tags within one sensing environment. Once queried, the tags then modulate the incoming signal from the interrogator with their own sequence, and reflect the signal back to the interrogator. What the interrogator then receives is a combination of backscatter from all of the tags within the sensing environment. Specialized software written in Matlab and LabView uses these unique sequences to isolate the data from a desired tag away from the sea of information being transmitted from every tag. Using this system, numerous applications for experiments and measurements can be devised. One such application this thesis focuses on is the use of this system to simultaneously measure signal strengths from multiple diversity antennas in order to optimize their position and orientation. Currently, the majority of antenna diversity measurements are taken by measuring the signal strength of a given configuration one antenna at a time. By using the anti-collision RFID system proposed above, the signal strength produced by both antennas can be measured and recorded simultaneously to provide a true representation of their combined performance. This measurement can be used to find the optimal configuration for multiple antennas. This thesis will fully explore the theories and procedures behind creating this system, and will provide the results and analysis of its performance.