A tale of RFID sleeping beauty
Posted by Scott Barvick on Fri, Jan 14, 2011
In the beginning
Here is some news for you - Standards don’t just magically fall out of the sky and get adopted. There was a time, reader vendors, RFID software providers, and end users spent time and energy worrying about simply connecting readers and reading tags through proprietary interfaces. Those organizations energy could have been better spent utilizing the newly standardized Gen 2 air protocol parameters to make RFID solutions work. The industry was spending its time reinventing basic connectivity details, and growth was slow due to lack of standards
LLRP Standards- A New Hope
It wasn’t easy, but in April 2007, LLRP was ratified and we finally had industry-wide agreement on a single way for RFID Software to talk to readers. It was not the easiest read, even if you knew what “TLV” stands for, or which memory bank the EPC is in. Adoption was hardly immediate, but the industry was committed, launching llrp.org to provide open source LLRP protocol decoding jump-start. The industry was putting it all together so that we could stop talking bits and bytes and start conversing about real use cases and build stable RFID software that would scale.
As LLRP, the Low Level Reader Protocol, nears its the fourth anniversary, it is instructive to look back at its development and adoption as another example of how standards have benefited all players in the RFID industry, from the tag makers all the way up to the end users. In fact, my hope is that many of you who are reading this are only peripherally aware that LLRP is the industry standard protocol for communicating between RFID software and readers. If that is the case, then those of us, who are writing the standard, have done our jobs right and the industry has moved to a point where it can devote all of its time and energy to providing a real customer value.
And they lived happily ever after
Today we have LLRP shipping as the only protocol interface on new readers from major vendors, and RFID software companies are using LLRP with their reader vendor partners to provide meaningful solutions. We no longer have the distraction of worrying about how we are going to get tags from readers, and we have the confidence that we can leverage the Gen 2 protocol to its fullest extent to get the most out of RFID. It took us a while to get there, perhaps a little too long, but the industry is strong and only looking forward.
My name is Scott Barvick and for more info about LLRP, please contact me on SBarvick@ODINRFID.com or visit ODIN website