Radio Frequency Identification - RFID - Advantages
The operation of RFID tag does not need to establish physical contact with the RFID reader to transmit its data, which proves advantageous from the following perspectives:
- No wear and tear. Absence of physical contact means there is no wear and tear on the readers as well as on the tags for reading and writing data.
- No slowing down of operations. Existing operations do not have to slow down to bear the extra overhead of bringing a reader physically into contact with a tag. Establishing such a physical contact can sometimes prove impossible. In a scenario in which tagged cases of items are moving at a rapid speed on a conveyor belt, there is a high chance that a reader will fail to maintain a physical contact with such a moving box, resulting in a missed tag read. As a result, had RFID been contact-based, it could not have been applied satisfactorily in a large number of business applications.
Also, newer RFID technology provides advantage of automatic reading of several tags in a short period of time. If RFID had been contact-based, the number of tags read by a reader would have been limited by the number of tags it could touch at a particular time. To increase this number, the reader's physical dimensions need to be increased, resulting in a higher-cost, and slow speed reader.
RFID offers several benefits, a good many of which you can realize today to a substantial degree with the existing products. Other benefits are also somewhat realizable, and it is expected that improvements in the technology will steadily bring these benefits to a mature level. Undeniably, however, such a collection of unique RFID benefits makes is already a potential enabler of a wide variety of applications.
Some of the benefits have privacy rights infringement implications that might present issues regarding RFID use in some situations. Even with these issues, however, RFID will likely be the preferred technology in other areas. RFID technology is currently undergoing rapid changes that are expected to provide continuously improving products, steadily bringing the true potential of the technology to the user.
In summary, RFID instantly offers several benefits just by being contact-less. In addition, this is clearly a current advantage of the technology.
