Reflecting all this, IDTechEx expanded the name of the world’s only major annual conference on Active RFID to “Active RFID and RTLS Summit” last year but now there is another trend coming into view. Active RFID with sensing is set to involve huge numbers of tags that communicate with each other in self healing mesh networks, the jargon for this being Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN). Sometimes these will merge with RTLS capability, so there are huge implications here for those such as TRAAK Systems that can deal with threatened data overload and others that can progress beyond ZigBee particularly in reducing power consumption to make these systems practicable. Who can increase range and supply affordable labels that do the job? Certainly systems with billions of tags for both RTLS and USN are in prospect, with the trends being as shown below. This is exercising the minds of many in the world’s leading software, electronics and systems companies and the marketing planners are already scoping the huge orders in prospect.
- People:
- Peter Harrop
- WhereNet